Arnhold Anja, Chen Aoju, Järvikivi Juhani
Department of Linguistics, University of KonstanzKonstanz, Germany; Department of Linguistics, University of AlbertaEdmonton, AB, Canada.
Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University Utrecht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2016 Dec 1;7:1886. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01886. eCollection 2016.
Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, , duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.
通过语言游戏在各种信息结构条件下引出短句，我们发现芬兰4到5岁的儿童在标记信息结构时已经表现出韵律和词序之间的一种特征性互动。生产数据一方面为这一复杂互动系统的习得提供了见解，显示出与芬兰成年说话者有趣的相似之处，另一方面也与习得其他语言的儿童相似。分析16名儿童总共生成的571个句子，我们发现儿童很少调整输入的词序，但在对比性宾语焦点条件下确实会系统性地避免有标记的OVS（宾语-动词-主语）语序。焦点条件也显著影响了四个韵律参数，即时长、停顿和嗓音质量。与芬兰成年语音中显示的效果略有不同，儿童在对比性焦点中生成的单词范围更大，在非焦点单词中生成的范围更小，仅改变宾语成分的时长，使其在焦点中更长，在非焦点条件下更短，在焦点成分之前和之后插入更多停顿，并且仅在窄焦点话语中系统性地改变他们对非模态嗓音质量的使用。至关重要的是，这些效果受到词序的调节。与习得日耳曼语族语言的儿童的可比数据相比，目前的研究结果反映了词序以及词序和韵律之间的互动在芬兰语信息结构标记中发挥的更核心作用。因此，这项研究突出了目标语言在决定语言发展方面的作用。
