The perception and interpretation of contrastive focus by Polish children and adults

Abstract

AbstractThe study aimed at testing Polish children’s and adult’s ability to identify and interpret three different contrastive focus types; narrow final focus, narrow non-final focus, and broad focus. In the first experiment eight-year-old children (N = 15) and young adults (N = 15, age range 19–23) were asked to spot the focus in short utterances, and produce contrastive elements in response to three types of inputs with three distinct focus types. In the second experiment eight and four year old children (N = 14 and N = 15, respectively) and young adults (N = 16) listened to two types of utterances – with final contrastive and non-final contrastive focus and were asked to select a picture that best matched the implied meaning of the auditory input. Although in each group there were individuals with ceiling results and chance results, on average the adults outperformed the children in all the tasks. Implications of the findings for testing prosody development are discussed.