Children’s use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English noun phrase conjuncts

Laura De Ruiter,Jidong Chen,Bhuvana Narasimhan,Jonah Lack

doi:10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4331

Abstract

Our study investigates the influence of information status on word order and prosody in children and adults. Using an elicited production task, we examine the ordering and intonation of noun phrases in phrasal conjuncts in 3-5-year-old and adult speakers of English. Findings show that English-speaking children are less likely to employ the ‘old-before-new’ order than adults and are also not adult-like in using prosody to mark information status. Our study suggests that even though intonation and word order are linguistic devices that are acquired early, their use to mark information status is still developing at age four.

Highlights

Children acquire – with little apparent effort – the core aspects of the ambient language by the age of five years
We focus on two means used by adult speakers to mark information status: word order and prosody
We investigated how the information status of referents influences Englishspeaking children’s and adults’ choice of word order and prosodic realization in noun phrase conjuncts

Summary

Introduction

Children acquire – with little apparent effort – the core aspects of the ambient language by the age of five years. We focus on two means used by adult speakers to mark information status: word order and prosody. Adult speakers have a robust preference to mention old referents before new referents (Clark & Clark 1977). In Germanic languages such as English, speakers typically accent new referents, and tend to deaccent given referents (Chafe 1974; Prince 1981). We know little about how word order and prosody interact in the marking of information status in child language. We investigate word order and prosody in monolingual English-speaking children’s production of phrasal conjuncts to label old and new referents. We chose conjunct noun phrases (e.g., an apple and a spoon), because they are easy to produce and they allow us to manipulate information status in noun phrases that do not otherwise differ in factors that affect word order and prosody, such as topicality, semantic role, or grammatical role

Background

Findings

Discussion