Despite several studies demonstrating sophisticated prosodic discrimination and pattern finding in infant perception (see Frota & Butler, 2018, for a recent review), research on the use of prosody for encoding information structure shows this skill to be mastered fairly late in children’s language development, and to be systematically affected by the prosodic system a child is acquiring (Chen, 2018; Ito, 2018). Furthermore, the relationship between perception and production is still unclear, even if the traditional view that production proceeds perception has been challenged (Chen, 2010). In this study we explore the production and perception of contrastive intonation in two varieties of Swedish whose contrasting prosodic/accent realisations will allow us to tap into the factors that drive prosodic development at an early stage. 

Previous work has indicated that Stockholm Swedish speaking children master the use of a prominence marking H(igh) tone for focus earlier than Dutch speaking children master the use of pitch accents for focus (Romøren, 2016; Romøren & Chen, 2016). One possible explanation for this finding is that the salient contours of the combination of lexical accent + prominence H in Stockholm Swedish makes prosodic focus marking particularly salient in this variety. Another is that the presence of lexical accents makes Swedish speaking children particularly sensitive to prosodic contrasts. While both Skåne and Stockholm Swedish make use of a lexical accent contrast, the marking of contrastive focus can be considered phonetically more subtle in the Skåne variety than in the Stockholm variety (Ambrazaitis et al., 2012; Bruce & Gårding, 1978). By studying the acquisition of contrastive focus in Stockholm and Skåne Swedish we will explore whether the phonetic realization of contrastive focus affects the way children learning these varieties both perceive and produce the contrast. 

We are designing a production/perception experiment in order to address our research questions. The production part will involve eliciting noun-adjective phrases (a big dog, a SMALL dog) from children via an ipad-based picture book. In the perception part we will use eye- tracking to investigate whether and how children make use of contrastive intonation for reference resolution (look at the big dog, now look at the SMALL dog) (see Ito, 2018). By designing parallel tasks for the two varieties, and by designing an experiment that mimics games children are accustomed to, we hope to understand more about how the prosodic system a child is acquiring affects the way prosodic focus marking develops, in both production and perception.

References 

Ambrazaitis, G., Frid, J., & Bruce, G. (2012). Revisiting Southern and Central Swedish intonation from a comparative and functional perspective. In O. Niebuhr (Ed.), Understanding prosody – The role of context, function, and communication. Berlin: de Gruyter, 135–158.   

Bruce, G., & Gårding, E. (1978). A prosodic typology for Swedish dialects. In E. Gårding, G. Bruce, and R. Bannert (eds.): Nordic Prosody – Papers from a Symposium. Lund University, 219-228.  

Chen, A. (2010). Is there really an asymmetry in the acquisition of the focus-to-accentuation mapping?.Lingua, 120, 1926-1939. 

Chen, A. (2018). Get the focus right across languages: acquisition of prosodic focus-marking in production. The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition. 

Frota, S., & Butler, J. (2018). Early development of intonation. The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition, 23, 145. 

Ito, K. (2018). Gradual development of focus prosody and affect prosody comprehension. The Development ofProsody in First Language Acquisition, 23, 247. 

Romøren, A. S. H., & Chen, A. (2016). Hunting highs and lows: Acquiring prosodic focus marking in Swedish and Dutch. In Proceedings of BUCLD (Vol. 40). 

Romoren, A. S. H. (2016). Hunting highs and lows: The acquisition of prosodic focus marking in Swedish and Dutch. LOT.