Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults.

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and Chen in Prosodic focus marking in Chinese four-and eight-year-olds, 2014). However, while prosodic focus marking did not seem to affect sentence comprehension in adults Mandarin-speaking children showed enhanced sentence comprehension when the sentence focus was marked by prosodic information in a previous study (Chen in Appl Psycholinguist 19(4):553-582, 1998).

Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds.

Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus.

Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm.

In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator alleen 'only' and different pitch accents, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven 'I only gave CELERY to the fireman' versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven 'I only gave celery to the FIREMAN'. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift to express different focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match different pictures: in Experiment 1 the Early Stress utterance matched the picture, in Experiment 2 both the Early and Late Stress utterance did, and in Experiment 3 neither did.