Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
J Child Lang. 2011 Nov;38(5):1055-83. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000541. Epub 2011 Mar 4.
This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-year-olds were adult-like in topic-marking, but were not yet fully adult-like in focus-marking, in particular, in the use of accent type in sentence-final focus (i.e. showing no preference for HL). Between age five and seven, the use of accent type was further developed. In contrast to the four- to five-year-olds, the seven- to eight-year-olds showed a preference for HL in sentence-final focus. Furthermore, they used accent type to distinguish sentence-initial focus from sentence-initial topic in addition to phonetic cues.
这项研究考察了四到五岁和七到八岁的儿童如何使用语调（重音位置和重音类型）来在荷兰语中编码主题和焦点。通过图片匹配游戏引出了具有句子初始主题和句子最终焦点或句子初始焦点和句子最终主题的自然说出的陈述句。结果表明，四到五岁的儿童在主题标记方面与成人相似，但在焦点标记方面尚未完全达到成人水平，特别是在句子最终焦点中使用重音类型（即不倾向于 HL）。在五到七岁之间，重音类型的使用进一步发展。与四到五岁的儿童相比，七到八岁的儿童在句子最终焦点中更倾向于使用 HL。此外，除了语音提示外，他们还使用重音类型来区分句子初始焦点和句子初始主题。
