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Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles

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 produc...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Helganger, Line Sjøtun, Falkum, Ingrid Lossius
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10126337/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37113121
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1116842
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author Helganger, Line Sjøtun
Falkum, Ingrid Lossius
author_facet Helganger, Line Sjøtun
Falkum, Ingrid Lossius
author_sort Helganger, Line Sjøtun
collection PubMed
description 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 jo: 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 jo by all age groups, both in combination with Polarity Focus and alone. Production of the sentence-internal pragmatic particle jo, 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 jo 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.
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spelling pubmed-101263372023-04-26 Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles Helganger, Line Sjøtun Falkum, Ingrid Lossius Front Psychol Psychology 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 jo: 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 jo by all age groups, both in combination with Polarity Focus and alone. Production of the sentence-internal pragmatic particle jo, 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 jo 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. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-04-11 /pmc/articles/PMC10126337/ /pubmed/37113121 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1116842 Text en Copyright © 2023 Helganger and Falkum. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Helganger, Line Sjøtun
Falkum, Ingrid Lossius
Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title_full Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title_fullStr Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title_full_unstemmed Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title_short Intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: The case of the Norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
title_sort intonational production as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence: the case of the norwegian polarity focus and two jo particles
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10126337/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37113121
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1116842
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