OLA5 Focus

OLA5. The acquisition of focus in a cross-linguistic perspective

Responsible: Judit Gervain

Members: Judit Gervain, Carline Bernard, Carla Soares

Description

Focus in natural language has an important communicative function. It highlights a certain part of an utterance, indicating to the hearer what the speaker intends to assert. The acquisition of focus shows seemingly paradoxical behaviour: children have been found to employ prosodic focus marking correctly at least in certain pragmatic contexts as young as 2 years (Wieman, 1976), while they seem to find it problematic to interpret focal accent (again, at least in certain contexts) at least until the age of 6 (Lahey, 1974; Bates, 1976; Szendroi 2004).

Our proposal is to perform production and comprehension experiments with English, French and German children aged 3-6 years. We take a cross-linguistic perspective to study the effect of how focus is marked: only prosodically, as in English; prosodically and, in addition, also optionally syntactically, as in German; or obligatorily syntactically (and prosodically), as in French. The German and English children are tested in collaboration with Barbara Hohle, University of Potsdam, Germany and Kriszta Szendroi, UCL, UK.

Focus in French is particularly interesting from an acquisition point of view. We investigate French contrastive focus, leaving aside information and other types of focus. Contrastive focus is syntactically realized using cleft sentences in French (Abeillé et al. 2004). However, such sentences can have at least two informational structures: narrow focus, the scope of which is only the clefted constituent and broad, sentential focus, the scope of which is the entire utterance. There is some evidence to suggest that in child-directed speech and writing, clefts almost always receive broad focus reading. It is therefore interesting to investigate whether the broad focus interpretation has an advantage during language acquisition in French.

Publications

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Other Productions

(1) Szendroi, K., Gervain, J., Berger, F., Höhle, B. 2012. “The acquisition of prosodic focus marking: evidence from 5-year-olds”. Poster presented at 37^th BUCLD, 2-4 November 2012, Boston, USA.

(2) Szendroi, K., Gervain, J., Bernard, C., Berger, F., Höhle, B. 2013. “The acquisition of prosodic focus marking: evidence from 5-year-olds”. Poster presented GALA 2013, 5-7 September 2013, Oldenburg, Germany.