The development of prosodic focus marking in French.

Introduction: French is traditionally described as a language favoring syntactic means to mark focus, yet recent research shows that prosody is also used. We examine how French-speaking children use prosody to realize narrow focus and contrastive focus in the absence of syntactic means, compared to adults.

Method: We elicited SVO sentences using a virtual robot-mediated picture-matching task from monolingual French-speaking adults ( = 11), 4- to 5-year-olds ( = 12), and 7- to 8-year-olds ( = 15).