ERIC Number: EJ1340595
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jul
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Children's Comprehension of Prosodically Marked Focus in Hungarian: How Mandatory Syntactic Focus-Marking Affects the Trajectory of Acquisition
Surányi, Balázs; Pinter, Lilla
Journal of Child Language, v49 n4 p824-838 Jul 2022
This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.
Descriptors: Reading Comprehension, Suprasegmentals, Hungarian, Syntax, Language Acquisition, Sentences, Children, Ambiguity (Semantics), Grammar, Language Variation, Romance Languages, German, Contrastive Linguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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