Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean-speaking children: the use of prosodic phrasing.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults.

Methods

Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years.

Results

We found that the children varied prosodic boundaries to distinguish narrow focus from pre-focus and broad focus in a largely adult-like manner at the age of 4 to 5; at this age, they did not distinguish narrow focus from post-focus or contrastive focus using prosod

SUBMITTER: Yang A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11331792 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature