In a number of languages, prosody is used to highlight new information (or focus). In Dutch, focus is marked by accentuation, whereby focal constituents are accented and post-focal constituents are de-accented. Even if pausing is not traditionally seen as a cue to focus in Dutch, several previous studies have pointed to a possible relationship between pausing and information structure. Considering that Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds are not yet completely proficient in using accentuation for focus and that children generally pause more than adults, we asked whether pausing might be an available parameter for children to manipulate for focus. Sentences with varying focus structure were elicited from 10 Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds and 9 Dutch-speaking adults by means of a picture-matching game. Comparing pause durations before focal and non-focal targets showed pre-target pauses to be significantly longer when the targets were focal than when they were not. Notably, the use of pausing was more robust in the children than in the adults, suggesting that children exploit pausing to mark focus more generally than adults do, at a stage where their mastery of the canonical cues to focus is still developing.
BoersmaP.WeeninkD. (2010). PRAAT: Doing phonetics by computer (version 5.1.25) [computer program]. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/
2.
ButcherA. (1981). Aspects of the speech pause: Phonetic correlates and communicative functions (Arbeitsberichte Nr. 15). Institut für Phonetik, Universität Kiel, Germany.
3.
CampioneE.VéronisJ. (2002). A large-scale multilingual study of silent pause duration. Proceedings from Speech Prosody 2002, Aix-en-Provence, France, 2002.
4.
ChafeW. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In LiC. (Ed.), Subject and topic. New York, NY: Academic Press.
5.
ChafeW. (1987). Cognitive constraints on information flow. In TomlinR. (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
6.
ChenA. (2007). Intonational realisation of topic and focus by Dutch-acquiring 4-to-5-year-olds. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences XCI, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2007.
7.
ChenA. (2009). The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch. In VigarioM. C.FrotaS.João FreitasM. (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology: Interactions and interrelations (pp. 91–106). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
8.
ChenA. (2011a). The developmental path to phonological focus-marking in Dutch. In FrotaS. (Ed.), Prosodic categories: Production, perception and comprehension. Studies in natural language and linguistic theory 82 (pp. 93–110). London, UK: Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
9.
ChenA. (2011b). Tuning information packaging: Intonational realization of topic and focus in child Dutch. Journal of Child Language, 38, 1055–1083.
10.
ChenA. (2014). Children’s use of intonation in reference and the role of input. In SerratriceL.AllenS. (Eds.), The acquisition of reference. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
11.
DahanD.BernardJ. (1996). Interspeaker variability in emphatic accent production in French. Language and Speech, 39(4), 341–374.
12.
DaltonP.HardcastleW. J. (1977). Disorders of fluency and their effects on communication. London, UK: Elsevier.
13.
De RuiterL. E. (2009). The prosodic marking of topical referents in the German ‘Vorfeld’ by children and adults. The Linguistic Review, 26(2/3), 329–354.
14.
FerreiraF. (2007). Prosody and performance in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(8), 1151–1177.
15.
FerreiraV. S.HudsonM. (2011). Saying “that” in dialogue: The influence of accessibility and social factors on syntactic production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(10), 1736–1762.
Goldman-EislerF. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. New York, NY: Academic Press.
18.
GuW.LeeT. (2007). Effects of focus on prosody of Cantonese speech – a comparison of surface feature analysis and model-based analysis. Proceedings of the International Workshop Paralinguistic Speech 2007, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2007.
19.
GundelJ. K.FretheimT. (2004). Topic and focus. In HornL. R.WardG. (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics, (pp. 175–196). Cornwall, UK: Blackwell.
20.
HallidayM. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English (II). Journal of Linguistics, 3, 199–244.
21.
HanssenJ.PetersJ.GussenhovenC. (2008). Prosodic effects of focus in Dutch declaratives. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Campinas, Brazil, 2008.
22.
HiekeA. E.KowalS.O’ConnellD. C. (1983). The trouble with “articulatory” pauses. Language and Speech, 26(3), 203–214.
23.
HornbyP. A.HassW. A. (1970). Use of contrastive stress by preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 13, 359–399.
24.
HuangB.LiaoX. (2002). Modern Chinese. Beijing, China: Higher Education Press.
25.
KrifkaM.MusanR. (2012). The expression of information structure. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.
26.
LambrechtK., 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topics, focus, and the representations of discourse referents. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
27.
MacWhinneyB.BatesE. (1978). Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: A cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 17, 539–555.
28.
MaloneyE. M.PayneL.RedfordM. A. (2012). What children’s pause patterns indicate about their constituent structure. Proceedings of BUCLD 36, Boston, MA, 2011.
29.
MolnárV. (2002). Contrast – from a contrastive perspective. Language and Computers, 39(1), 147–161.
30.
MüllerA.HöhleB.SchmitzM.WeissenbornJ. (2006). Focus-to-stress alignment in 4- to 5-year-old German-learning children. Proceedings of GALA 2005, Cambridge, UK, 2005.
31.
RedfordM. A. (2013). A comparative analysis of pausing in child and adult storytelling. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34(1), 569–589.
32.
RobertsC. (1996). Information structure: Towards an integrated theory of formal pragmatics. In YoonJ. H.KatholA. (Eds.), OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 49. Columbus: The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics.
33.
RochesterS. R. (1975). Defining the silent pause in speech. Journal of the Ontario Speech and Hearing Association, 8, 1–14.
34.
RomørenA. S. H.ChenA. (2014). Accentuation, pitch and duration as cues to focus in Dutch 4- to 5-year-olds. Proceedings from BUCLD 2013, Boston, MA, 2013.
35.
SabinE.ClemmerE.O’ConnellD.KowalS. (1979). A pausological approach to speech development. In SiegmanA.FeldsteinS. (Eds.), Of speech and time: Temporal speech patterns and interpersonal contexts (pp. 35–55). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
36.
SwertsM.GeluykensR. (1994). Prosody as a marker of information flow in spoken discourse. Language and Speech, 37(1), 21–43.
37.
TurkA.NakaiS.SugaharaM. (2006). Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: A practical guide. In SudhoffS. (Ed.), Methods in empirical prosody research (pp. 1–28). Berlin, Germany and New York, NY: Walter De Gruyter.
38.
VallduvíE.EngdahlE. (1996). The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics, 34, 459–519.
39.
WagnerM.WatsonD. G. (2010). Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7–9), 905–945.
40.
WellsB.PeppéS.GoulandrisN. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31, 749–778.
41.
WiemanL. (1976). Stress patterns in early child language. Journal of Child Language, 3, 283–286.
42.
WijnenF. (1990). The development of sentence planning. Journal of Child Language, 17(3), 651–675.
43.
WonnacottE.WatsonD. G. (2008). Acoustic emphasis in four year olds. Cognition, 107(3), 1093–1101.
44.
ZellnerB. (1994). Pauses and the temporal structure of speech. In KellerE. (Ed.), Fundamentals of speech synthesis and speech recognition (pp. 41–62). Chichester, UK: John Wiley.
