The development of prosodic focus marking in French

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Phonetics

Background:

• French traditionally relies on syntax for focus marking.
• Recent research indicates prosody also plays a role in marking focus in French.
• Understanding the developmental trajectory of prosodic focus marking in children is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how French-speaking children use prosody to mark narrow and contrastive focus.
• To compare children's prosodic focus marking strategies with those of adults.
• To examine the influence of syntactic dominance on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking.

Main Methods:

• Elicited SVO sentences using a robot-mediated picture-matching task.
• Participants included monolingual French-speaking adults and children aged 4-5 and 7-8 years.
• Prosodic features (duration, intensity, pitch) of subject and object nouns were analyzed using linear mixed-effects modeling.

Main Results:

• Four- to five-year-olds did not utilize prosodic cues for focus marking.
• Seven- to eight-year-olds used increased duration, intensity, and pitch for object focus, mirroring adult patterns.
• Adults primarily used duration for subject focus, while 7-8 year olds used pitch.

Conclusions:

• Confirms that 4-5 year olds do not use prosody for focus.
• Suggests 7-8 year olds employ prosody for object focus more like adults than for subject focus.
• Syntax dominance in French may shape the acquisition of prosodic focus marking.