Acquisition of Narrow Focus Prosody

In English, broad and late narrow focus have identical accent patterns: Pitch accents are aligned with the last ac-centable constituent within an intonation contour. Under early narrow focus, the pitch accent is claimed to shift to an earlier location and the last accentable syllable is deaccented. This study examined the acquisition of the narrow focus pattern, using a picture-naming task, in which either the object or its color differed from the previous picture. Spontaneous utterances from 42 children (age 3-10) and six adults were obtained with inplicit and explicit contrast (narrow focus) on either adjective or noun, and labeled prosodically for pitch-accent type and location. A subset of the utterances was used in a perception experiment: 18 naive listeners judged the felicitousness of an utterance in the two possible contexts. An ANOVA on the contrast type showed that listeners consistently rate the adjective more emphasized when implicitly contrasted. Yet, a majority rule count on the tonal transcriptions for accentua-tion on this subset shows almost exclusively 'noun-accented' ratings, suggesting that nouns were not completely deac-cented when narrow focus was on the adjective .