Helganger Line Sjøtun, Falkum Ingrid Lossius
Department of Languages and Literature Studies, University of South-Eastern Norway, Kongsberg, Norway.
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Front Psychol. 2023 Apr 11;14:1116842. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1116842. eCollection 2023.
The use of the Norwegian intonation pattern Polarity Focus highlights the polarity of a contextually given thought and enables the speaker to signal whether she believes it to be a true or false description of some state of affairs. In this study, we investigate whether preschool children can produce this intonation pattern and what their productions reveal about the development of their early pragmatic abilities. We also explore their use of Polarity Focus in combination with two particles encoded by the linguistic form : a sentence-initial response particle, and a sentence-internal pragmatic particle. We used a semi-structured elicitation task consisting of four test conditions of increasing complexity to shed light on the developmental trajectory of the mastery of Polarity Focus. Our results show that already from the age of 2 children are proficient users of this intonation pattern, which occurs in three out of four conditions for this age group. As expected, only 4- and 5-year-olds produced Polarity Focus in the most complex test condition that required the attribution of a false belief. We further found production of sentence-initial response particle by all age groups, both in combination with Polarity Focus and alone. Production of the sentence-internal pragmatic particle , felicitously co-occurring with Polarity Focus, emerges around age 3. This study presents the first experimental evidence of Norwegian children's mastery of intonation as a communicative device in language production and their use of the two particles. We show how intonational production can be used as a window into children's early pragmatic competence: The mastery of the production of Polarity Focus can be seen as an early linguistic manifestation of the cognitive abilities for the attribution of thoughts and epistemic vigilance towards propositional content.
挪威语调模式“极性焦点”的使用突出了上下文给定思想的极性，并使说话者能够表明她认为这是对某种事态的真实还是虚假描述。在本研究中，我们调查了学龄前儿童是否能够产生这种语调模式，以及他们的表达揭示了其早期语用能力的哪些发展情况。我们还探讨了他们将“极性焦点”与语言形式编码的两个小品词结合使用的情况：句首回应小品词和句内语用小品词。我们使用了一个半结构化引出任务，该任务由四个复杂度递增的测试条件组成，以阐明对“极性焦点”掌握的发展轨迹。我们的结果表明，2岁的儿童就已经熟练使用这种语调模式，在该年龄组的四个条件中有三个条件会出现这种模式。正如预期的那样，只有4岁和5岁的儿童在需要错误信念归因的最复杂测试条件下产生了“极性焦点”。我们进一步发现，所有年龄组都产生了句首回应小品词，既可以与“极性焦点”结合使用，也可以单独使用。与“极性焦点”恰当地共同出现的句内语用小品词在3岁左右出现。本研究提供了挪威儿童将语调作为语言产生中的一种交际手段的掌握情况以及他们对这两个小品词的使用的首个实验证据。我们展示了语调产生如何可以用作了解儿童早期语用能力的窗口：对“极性焦点”产生的掌握可以被视为对思想归因和对命题内容的认知警惕的认知能力的早期语言表现。
