Intonational realisation of topic and focus in child Dutch Aoju Chen Max Planck Institute for Psycho

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Intonational realisation of topic and focus in
child DutchAoju Chen Max Planck Institute
for PsycholinguisticsNVFW seminar on
ProsodyMPI, Nijmegen, 1 June, 2007
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Outline

• 1. Topic-focus and their intonational realisation
  in Germanic languages
• 2. Prior work on topic-focus in child language
• 3. The present study
• 4. Conclusions
• 5. Topics for future research

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Topic and focus at the sentence level

• The topic the entity about which information is
  provided
• typically realised as a NP or a pronoun at the
  sentence level
• The focus the information that is provided about
  the topic
• e.g. What did the children do next?
• The children topic went to
  school focus.

Lambrecht (1994)
Information focus (presentational focus)
Relationally new
Relationally given
Referentially given
Gundel and Fretheim (in press)
Non-contrastive
No, the children watched TV focus.
Non-contrastive
Contrastive/corrective
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Intonation of focus

• Speaker A Which class do you have today?
• Speaker B I have physics.

Information focus (presentational focus)
HL
Contrastive focus (corrective focus)
contrastive

• Speaker C I have mathematics.

• Speaker D No, we have psycholinguistics.
• (Cs classmate)

Gussenhoven (2006)
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(Possible) Intonation of topic

• Deaccented
• LH
• HL

Wie eet een biet? Who eats a beet?
De poetsvrouw eet een biettopic. The
cleaning-lady eats a beet.
Lambrecht (1994)
Wie eet een biet? Who eats a beet?
Braun (2006)
De poetsvrouw eet een biettopic. The
cleaning-lady eats a beet.
Wie pakt de vaas? who picks up the vase?
De pestkop pakt de vaastopic. The pest picks
up the vase.
Vallduví Engdahl (1996) Braun (2006) Hedberg
Sosa (2007)
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Topic and focus in child language

• Commonality of the topic-focus structure prior to
  and in the two-word stage
• Successive two one-word utterances
• e.g. Finger. Touch (Scollon 1976)
• Two-word utterances
• e.g. Federica acqua Federica water (child
  pretends to drink) (DOdorico 2003)
• 
  
• Use of intonation in expressing topic and focus
• In the one-word stage
• Not expressed intonationally (Bloom 1973)
• In the two word stage
• Accenting the focus and deaccenting the topic
  (Wieman 1976)
• Not expressed intonationally (Chen Fikkert, to
  appear)
• In the grammatical multi-word speech stage
• The use of accentuation in marking contrast

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Topic and focus in child language (contd)

• Contrast newness in English
• A picture-description task
• Picture 1 A boy is riding a bike
• Picture 2 A GIRL is riding a bike.
• Correct use of contrastive stress at the age of
  3 and 4
• Most frequently in sentence-initial position
• An increase in the use of contrastive stress in
  older children
• Contrast focus in German
• An imitation task
• Child repeats the answer to a WH-question
• Question Tomorrow is Eva and Peters mothers
• birthday Eva wants to bake
  cookies. What
• does Peter back?)
• Answer Peter bakes a CAKE.

(Hornby and Hass 1970, MacWhinney and Bates 1978)
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Topic and focus in child language (contd)

• No clear predictions on the use of accent
  placement in marking topic and focus
• Conflicting effects of sentence position
• Sentence final weaker intonational realisation
  (H H 1970)
• Sentence final stronger intonational realisation
  (Müller et al. 2005)
• No information on the use of pitch accent type in
  the marking of topic and focus
• Accent type matters in adult language
• Development of inventory of pitch accent types in
  child language

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The present study

• How do Dutch-acquiring children (gt3 yrs) use
  pitch accent types and deaccentuation to realise
  full NP non-contrastive topic and focus?
• e.g. Speaker A What did the boy draw?
• Speaker B The boytopic drew a castlefocus.
  
• Are topic and focus typically associated with a
  certain accent type?
• Does the position of topic and focus (sentence
  initial vs. sentence final) matter?
• Do children differ from adults?
• Is there development over time?

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Method

• An Answer-reconstruction task (in a
  picture-matching game)
• Participants
• 4- to 5-year-olds
• 7- to 8-year-olds
• 10- to 11-year olds
• Adults

Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
(N20, age range 45-57, mean age 51)
(N14, age range 72-810, mean age 75)
(N12, age range103-1110, mean age 104)
(N25)
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Method (contd)

• Stimuli
• 36 question-answer pairs
• Answers have a fixed word order SVO
• 18 pairs with questions about the subject
• 18 pairs with questions about the object
• Each subject NP and each object NP occur in both
  groups of question-answer pairs but in
  combination with different VPs and SVs.
• e.g. Wat bescherm de vos? De vos beschermt het
  bos.
• e.g. Wie beschert de fiets? De vos beschermt de
  fiets.
• e.g. Wat steelt de pestkop? De pestkop steelt een
  fiets.

Who protects the bike? The fox protects the bike.
Initial Focus
Final Topic
What does the fox protect? The fox protects the
forest.
Final Focus
Initial Topic
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Method (contd)

• Intonation transcription
• ToDI a few additional labels (Gussenhoven 2005)
• Annotator 1
• Annotating all data 2-3 times with a 2-week
  interval or longer
• Blind to the experimental conditions
• Annotator 2
• Annotating a selection of the data independent of
  Annotator 1
• Checking all labels with doubts from Annotator 1
• Disagreements were resolved together

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Analyses

• Within-subject factors
• Pragmatic condition (topic, focus)
• Position (sentence initial, sentence final)
• Between-subject factor
• Age
• Dependent variables
• Mean percentage () distributions of
• Deaccentuation
• H
• HL
• LH
• !HL

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Results Adults

• Focus
• Sentence-initial mostly HL (78), H (13)
• Sentence-final most frequently HL (46), !HL
  (26), deaccented (17)
• Topic
• Sentence-initial mostly HL (65), H (20)
• Sentence-final typically deaccented (62), !HL
  (27)

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Interim discussion

• Deaccentuation as the default intonation of topic
• Facilitating the processing of relationally given
  information (e.g. Terken and Nootboom 1987, Birch
  and Clifton 1995)
• Facilitating the marking of focus
• Why is sentence-initial topic mostly accented?
• Rhythmically motivated accent the accentable
  word preceding the accent that marks focus within
  the same IP (Horne 1991, Terken Hirschberg
  1994)

Wat beschermt de vos? De vostopic beschermt
het bosfocus. 1.
HL L 2. HL
HL L

• Pattern 2 was judged to be more pleasant sounding
  than pattern 1 by native speakers of Dutch.
• (Chen 2007)

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Interim discussion (contd)

• Consequences for language acquisition
• Children need to learn to associate HL with
  focus and deaccentuation with topic.
• Further, they need to know that topic can be
  accented for rhythmic motivation when preceding
  an accent assigned to mark focus in the same
  intonational phrase.

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Results 4- to 5-year-olds
Mean distributions of accent types across
conditions
Adults (N10)
4- to 5-yr-olds (N20)
OTHER HLH, L, LHL, HLHL, LHLH
OTHER HLH, L, LHL
LH
HL
!HL
H
deaccented
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Results 4- to 5-year-olds (contd)
Sentence-initial (N20)

• Deaccentuation topic gt focus, independent of
  sentence position, contra prior work.
• Focus (1) Sentence-initially, mostly HL,
  followed by H
• (2) Sentence-finally, mostly LH and HL. (why
  LH?)
• Topic (1) similar realisation to focus, with
  only one difference concerning LH
• (2) realised similarly frequently with LH, HL,
  and deaccentuation

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Results 4- to 5-year-olds (contd)

• Phrasing
• In both topic and focus conditions, an IP
  boundary occurs more frequently after the
  sentence-initial NP (subject) than after the
  verb.
• However,
• an IP boundary occurs after the subject more
  frequently when it is topical
• an IP boundary occurs after the verb (or before
  the object) more frequently when the subject is
  focal and the object is topical.

Position x Pragmatics F (1, 17) 2.64, p0.12
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4- to 5-yr-olds vs. adults

• Sentence-finally, children use HL similarly
  frequently in topic and focus adults use HL
  typically to realise focus.
• Sentence-initially, children show a weaker
  preference for HL over H in sentence-initial
  topic/focus than adults.
• Children accent sentence-final topic frequently
  (gt85) deaccentuation is the typical intonation
  of topic in adult Dutch.
• 4- to 5-year-olds tend to insert an IP after
  sentence-initial topic and before sentence-final
  topic adults rarely do this.

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Interim summary

• 4- to 5-years-olds have adult-like inventory of
  pitch accent types.
• They are sensitive to the accentuation-focus and
  deaccentuation-focus associations, like adults
• The Lack of effect of sentence position on
  accentuation suggest that children under 6 are
  not sensitive to the role of sentence position in
  marking topic and focus.
• 4- to 5-years-olds have not acquired HL as the
  typical focus pitch accent and deaccentuation as
  the default intonation of topic.
• They appear to use phrasing as another means to
  realise topic.

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Results 7- to 8-yr-olds
7- to 8-yr-olds (N5) sentence initial
7- to 8-yrs-olds (N5) sentence-final
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Results all age groups
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Results all age groups (contd)
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Conclusions

• Children as young as 4 have adult-like inventory
  of pitch accent types in Dutch.
• Children are sensitive to the accentuation-focus
  and deaccentuation-topic associations at the age
  of 4, as suggested in prior work.
• However, children under 6 are not adult-like in
  intonational marking of topic and focus.
• They acquire HL as the typical focus accent
  and deaccentuation as the typical topic
  intonation at the age of 7 or 8.
• Possibly, frequent use of HL in sentence-initial
  topic in adult Dutch has made it difficult for
  young children to extract the functions of HL
  and deaccentuation from the input.
• Only 4- to 5-year-olds appear to use phrasing to
  realise sentence-initial topic, which forms its
  own IP. Older children and adults utter the
  topic-focus structure mostly as one IP.

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Topics for future research

• How do pitch accent types affect the
  interpretation of topic and focus by children?
• Will a deaccented NP create a bias towards a
  topic interpretation and an NP with HL a focus
  interpretation?
• How do pitch accent types affect the processing
  of given vs. new information in 4- to 5-yr-olds?
• Will their overuse of accentuation mask the
  facilitating effect of pragmatically appropriate
  intonation?
• Can listeners tell the topic apart from the focus
  in the sentence initial position?
• Any differences in the phonetic realisation of
  HL?

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Special thanks
Information Structure in Language
Acquisition Christine Dimroth Laura
Herbst Wolfgang Klein Bhuvana Narasimhan Sarah
Schimke Alice Kruisselbrink (former
student-assistant) Marieke Hoetjes Steven Rekké
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Thank you!