2018 Friday Session A 1430

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Session A, East Balcony | 2:30pm

Understanding Prosodic and Syntactic Focus by Mandarin and German Five-year- olds: Evidence from Eye-tracking Studies
H. Chen, B. Höhle, S. Crain

How information structure (IS) affects the structure of verbal utterances and how listeners interpret the cues related to IS has been explored for decades. Following Rooth’s definition, focus indicates the presence of alternatives in the discourse [1]. Across languages, focus can be realized by different linguistic means like syntactic or prosodic information. Still, it remains controversial when children acquire the language specific means of focus marking: while some studies suggest a rather late acquisition some more recent studies point to a much earlier acquisition of language specific means to mark focus [2,3,4]. The present study investigated German- and Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of prosodic and syntactic means of focus marking. These two languages allow for both prosodic and syntactic focus but are different in the preferred way of focus marking (German uses mainly focus accent while Mandarin uses word order). Thus comparing children acquiring these languages should shed light on the impact of language general and language specific aspects in the development of focus marking.

Using a sentence-picture verification task within a visual world paradigm, 35 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, 37 Mandarin-speaking adults, 28 5-year-old German-speaking children and 30 German-speaking adults were tested with in a between subject design. There were two sentence conditions, a prosodically-marked focus (Subject-accented condition), and a syntactically-marked focus (Subject-cleft condition) (table 1). We only report the results of subject focus conditions since object focus is considered as default focus [5]. The pictures presented with a sentence that did not match the sentence content but they were designed in a way such that participants could correct either the Subject NP or the Object NP, depending on the assignment of focus. Participants were expected to use the pitch accent in the prosody condition and follow syntactic cues in the syntax condition, i.e., Subject NP corrections in the Subject-accented and Subject-cleft test sentences. Concerning the eye- tracking data, the same looking patterns for adult and child participants were expected [6, 7].

Linear mixed-effect models were used to analyze the responses and the proportion of looks to the ROI. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking children performed significantly worse than German-speaking children in the Subject-accented condition (response: b=10.334, SE=3.107, Z=3.226, p<0.001; looking-proportion: b=0.346, SE=0.052, Z=6.651, p<0.001). Further, Mandarin children enhanced their looks to the alternative subject more strongly in the Subject-cleft than in the Subject-accented condition (b=0.225, SE=0.043, Z=5.175, p<0.001). Mandarin-speaking adults showed the same pattern but with a stronger advantage for the syntactic cues compared to the children (response: b=7.703, SE=3.842, Z=2.005, p<0.05; looking-proportion: b=0.103, SE=0.045, Z=2.300, p<0.05). For the German speakers, both the syntactic cues as well as prosodic cues had stronger effects on their performance compared to Mandarin speakers (Response: b=-6.593, SE=3.834, Z=-1.713, p=0.08; Looking-proportion: b=-0.298, SE=0.069, Z=-4.295, p<0.001). These findings suggest that German speakers rely more strongly on prosodic cues for focus identification than Mandarin speakers and that Mandarin speakers show an advantage for syntactic over prosodic cues. Most importantly, 5-year-old children already follow these language specific patterns in their comprehension of focus marking.