Romøren Anna Sara H, Chen Aoju
Lang Speech. 2015 Mar;58(Pt 1):8-23. doi: 10.1177/0023830914563589.
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.
在许多语言中，韵律被用来突出新信息（或焦点）。在荷兰语中，焦点通过重音来标记，即焦点成分被重读，焦点后成分则不重读。即使传统上在荷兰语中停顿不被视为焦点的线索，但先前的一些研究已经指出停顿与信息结构之间可能存在关系。考虑到说荷兰语的4到5岁儿童在使用重音来表示焦点方面尚未完全熟练，而且儿童通常比成年人停顿更多，我们研究了停顿是否可能是儿童用来表示焦点的一个可用参数。通过图片匹配游戏，从10名说荷兰语的4到5岁儿童和9名说荷兰语的成年人那里引出了具有不同焦点结构的句子。比较焦点目标和非焦点目标之前的停顿持续时间发现，当目标是焦点时，目标前的停顿明显比不是焦点时更长。值得注意的是，儿童比成年人更频繁地使用停顿，这表明在他们对焦点的典型线索的掌握仍在发展的阶段，儿童比成年人更普遍地利用停顿来标记焦点。
