Intonation and focus in early childhood. Does prosody trigger activation of alternatives in 5 y.o. Italian Chidren?
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1
University of Siena, Italy
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2
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Background. The broad notion of focus can be considered to indicate the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions (Rooth 1992), whereas the Pragmatic Use of Focus (Krifka 2007) refers to constructions where these alternatives are contextually determined. Among the different focus-marking strategies, one is the prosodic contour. Consider (1)-(2):
(1) Io metto la bottiglia [NELLA SCATOLA] NPA on the goal
I put the bottle [IN THE BOX]
(2) Io metto [LA BOTTIGLIA] nella scatola NPA on the direct object
I put [THE BOTTLE] in the box
(1)-(2): are string-identical, but differ in the placement of the nuclear pitch-accent (NPA) (in capitals). See Gili Fivela et al.2015. Sentences (1)-(2) activate distinct sets of alternatives: (1) activates alternative goals (e.g. {box, backpack…}) while (2) alternative objects (e.g. {glass, bottle…}). (1) may be thus felicitously uttered to exclude salient alternative goals (e.g. I place the bottle [IN THE BOX], not in the backpack) while (2) to exclude alternative objects (e.g. I place [THE BOTTLE] in the box, not the glass).
1. Focus and prosodic marking in young children. Children have to learn that a certain prosodic contour associates with the Pragmatic Use of Focus, and activates the contextually salient set of alternatives. Existing literature returns a complex picture. While some studies suggest that children at around age 5 can already associate a specific prosodic contour to the relevant set of alternatives (a.o. Ito et al.2012 for Japanese, Szendröi et al.2017 for English, French and German), others suggest instead that this is acquired only much later (a.o. Sekerina&Trueswell,2012). To start to understand the developmental pattern in Italian, we designed a novel experiment.
2. The experiment. We used a methodology similar to the one employed by Szendröi et al.2017, adapted to Italian. We present children with a two-alternative forced choice task in which they have to select who said the target sentence, choosing between two characters. The two were presented on screen with different sets of objects (Objects) and different sets of possible locations (Goals). Consider Fig. 1: one character (Left frame) has multiple objects, the other has multiple locations (Right frame). Thus (1) is more felicitous if uttered by the girl with a 2-members object set (Left frame), while sentence (2) by the girl with a 2-member location set (Right frame). We expect that if adults and children are sensitive to the alternative set made salient by the prosodic manipulation illustrated in (1)-(2), their proportion of choices on the character with a 2-member object set will vary in function of NPA placement: higher with (2) and lower with (1).
Materials. We created 12 items, consisting of a screen dived in two frames (Fig. 1) and a pre-recorded sentence. The sentences were constituted by ditransitive verbs with a direct object (O) and a goal (G), cf. (1)-(2). We tested two crossed binary factors:
i. NPA was assigned to either O or G;
ii. the location (left vs. right) of the frame with the alternative set congruent w.r.t. the alternative set activated by the NPA marking focus.
The experimental stimuli (48=12*4) were divided in 4 and to each list we added 12 fillers. The order of the trials was pseudo-randomized.
Participants. 28 adults (>20 y.o.) took part in the experiment along with 59 children, (mean age 4;9 y.o)
Method. Children and adults sat in front of a laptop computer in a quiet room. The experiment, implemented in OpenSesame, was preceded by a brief warm-up. Participants were asked to identify which character (in the left or right frame) more likely uttered the sentence played by computer speakers. All children correctly understood the task (> 90% in warm-up and fillers).
Results were analysed with a series of mixed effects regressions (lme4) with log-odds of “Right frame” answer as the dependent variable. We specified NPA-placement (Object vs. Goal), location of the congruent contrast set (Left vs. Right frame), and age group (adults vs. children) as fixed effects, and crossed by-subject and by-item random intercepts and slopes. See Fig. 2. We observed a significant main effect of age group and a two-way interaction between NPA-placement and age group: unlike adults, children showed a very strong bias toward the left frame (Fig.2, bottom-panels). For adults, the location of the congruent alternative set significantly predicts which frame is selected, but only when NPA is assigned to O (fig2, top-left panel) (a significant three-way interaction). This result is compatible with the hypothesis that prosodic focus marking can project (Selkirk 1995): when NPA occurs in its default position, i.e. rightmost in Italian, the interpretation is ambiguous between a narrow focus interpretation as described for (1) and a broad focus interpretation in which no set of alternatives for the NPAed constituent is evoked.
3. Discussion. Our results show no effect of prosody both in the 4- and in the 5-yar-olds group. This result is in line with the findings in Sekerina&Trueswell (2012) and it suggests that focus sensitivity can vary in function of the target language. Also Szendröi et al 2017, that used a similar methodology, found that children’s sensitivity to focus prosody greatly varies between English and French speaking children, with the latter being less sensitive to prosodic manipulations. Our experiment suggests that 5-year-olds Italian children are even less sensitive than their French peers. A possible explanation could capitalize on the prosodic and syntactic characteristics of the target languages. While in some languages prosody is the sole cue to convey contrast (e.g. English), other language could, in addition to pitch-contrasts, also employ syntactic strategy that have an impact on word ordering. French and to an even greater extent Italian (a.o. Cruschina 2016) are such languages. Thus it is possible to argue that when paired with syntactic cues, prosody is less prominent and the mapping between pitch-contrast and their semantic-Pragmatic function is slower to acquire.
References
Cruschina, S. (2016). Information and discourse structure. In Ledgeway & Maiden (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University, 596–608.
Ito K. N. Jincho, U. Minai b,c, N. Yamane, R. Mazuka (2012). Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year olds. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1) p265–284
Krifka, M. Basic notions of information structure. In Caroline Fery & Manfred Krifka (eds.), Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6, 13-56.
Rooth, M. (1992), “A theory of focus interpretation”, Natural Language Semantics 1, 75-116.
Selkirk, E. (1995a. Sentence Prosody: Intonation, Stress, and Phrasing. In J.A. Goldsmith (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Cambridge: Blackwell, 550–569
Sekerina, I. A. and J. C. Trueswell (2012). Interactive Processing of Contrastive Expressions by Russian Children, First Language 32: 63–87.
Szendrői K., C. Bernard, F. Berger, J. Gervain, B. Höhle (2017). Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-yearolds. Journal of Child Language 45(1):219–241.
Keywords:
Prosody,
information structure,
language acquisition,
discourse,
phonology
Conference:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster or Oral
Topic:
Experimental Pragmatics
Citation:
Moscati
V and
Bocci
G
(2018). Intonation and focus in early childhood. Does prosody trigger activation of alternatives in 5 y.o. Italian Chidren?.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00035
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Received:
14 May 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
*
Correspondence:
PhD. Vincenzo Moscati, University of Siena, Siena, Italy, moscati.v@gmail.com