Intentional Control and Operational Constraints in Prosodic Phrasing: A Study of Picture-elicited Narrations by French Children

Abstract

This study deals with the determinants of prosodic phrasing in French schoolchildren's narratives. Children (aged 7 to 11) told picture stories to a silent same-age peer. The establishment of temporal and/or causal relations between the events was more or less guided by the drawings (ordered vs. arbitrary sequences). The comprehension of the referential links was more or less supported by the way the frames were displayed (simultaneous vs. consecutive display mode). Four storytelling conditions that differed by the constraints imposed on inference-resolving and memory-searching were thus defined. Naïve French listeners were asked to segment tape-recorded narrations using prosodic variation as a criterion, and to decide whether each prosodic segment was "conclusive" or "continuative." The comparison of the listeners' segmentation labels to those of an expert (functional and formal annotation) showed that more than 91% of the labels corresponded to prosodic boundaries and more than 78% of the non-terminal labels corresponded to non-terminal boundaries, but only 55% of the terminal labels corresponded to terminal boundaries. The storytellers' boundaries were then analyzed as a function of age and storytelling conditions. Non-terminal and terminal boundaries varied with the picture-display mode. Terminal boundaries also depended on the type of event sequence, and non-terminal boundaries on the improvement of the linguistic and communicative skills of the narrators. Terminal judgments of non-terminal boundaries mainly occurred in texts where each event was told in a single proposition either without anaphoric references to the main character or with anaphoric pronouns.