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The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children

This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-relat...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yang, Anqi, Chen, Aoju
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187310/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30369676
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723717733920
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author Yang, Anqi
Chen, Aoju
author_facet Yang, Anqi
Chen, Aoju
author_sort Yang, Anqi
collection PubMed
description This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones in an adult-like way to distinguish focus from non-focus at the age of four to five. Their use of pitch-related cues is not yet fully adult-like in certain tones at the age of eleven. Further, they are adult-like in the use of duration in distinguishing narrow focus from broad focus at four or five but in not using pitch-related cues for this purpose at seven or eight. The later acquisition of pitch-related cues may be related to the use of pitch for lexical purposes, and the differences in the use of pitch in different tones can be explained by differences in how easy it is to vary pitch-related parameters without changing tonal identity.
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spelling pubmed-61873102018-10-24 The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children Yang, Anqi Chen, Aoju First Lang Articles This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones in an adult-like way to distinguish focus from non-focus at the age of four to five. Their use of pitch-related cues is not yet fully adult-like in certain tones at the age of eleven. Further, they are adult-like in the use of duration in distinguishing narrow focus from broad focus at four or five but in not using pitch-related cues for this purpose at seven or eight. The later acquisition of pitch-related cues may be related to the use of pitch for lexical purposes, and the differences in the use of pitch in different tones can be explained by differences in how easy it is to vary pitch-related parameters without changing tonal identity. SAGE Publications 2017-10-11 2018-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6187310/ /pubmed/30369676 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723717733920 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Yang, Anqi
Chen, Aoju
The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title_full The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title_fullStr The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title_full_unstemmed The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title_short The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children
title_sort developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in mandarin chinese-speaking children
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187310/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30369676
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723717733920
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