Children’s acquisition of the pragmatics of intonation

Abstract

When we communicate, we rely on a variety of linguistic cues to convey our intended meaning or to understand the communicative intentions of others. One such cue is intonation, that is, the tonal movement of utterances. Intonation signals an utterance’s information structure and contributes to making some contextual implications more salient than others. This thesis investigates preschool children’s acquisition of this communicative function of intonation (what I call ‘the pragmatics of intonation’). Little is known about intonational development in the preschool years and how this competence interacts with developing pragmatic competence. Furthermore, what constitutes children’s early pragmatic abilities is debated in the literature. This thesis addresses these gaps through three subprojects, guided by the following overarching research question: How does children’s ability to master intonation as a communicative device develop? The first subproject is a production study investigating Norwegian two- to five-year-olds’ use of polarity focus, an intonation pattern that enables the speaker to signal whether she believes a contextually given thought to be true or false. Using a semi-structured elicitation task, we found that from the age of two years children are proficient users of polarity focus suggesting that they have the capacity to mentally represent thoughts, to take the perspective of others, and to be attentive to and express their attitude towards the truth-conditional content of utterances. This study also explores productions of two jo particles, which frequently cooccurred with polarity focus productions in our data and share some of the pragmatic features of polarity focus. The second subproject investigates Norwegian three- to five-year-olds’ sensitivity to intonational cues when interpreting utterances containing the additive focus particle også in a postverbal position. The use of også signals that an additional subject or object, depending on the intonational realization of the utterance, is to be included in the context. We used a combined eye-tracking and picture selection design. Results showed that sensitivity to intonational cues can be detected as early as the age of three. While the three-year-olds performed as well as the five-year-olds in their picture selections, the four-year-olds performed poorly overall. An unexpected finding was that the adult control group did not show sensitivity to the intonational cues. We discuss possible explanations for these results, highlighting how experimental investigations into subtle linguistic-pragmatic cues may pose challenges for participants, and that the development of other cognitive abilities such as a growing metalinguistic awareness may mask participants’ competence. The third subproject is a contribution to the theoretical debate on the productioncomprehension asymmetry in children’s acquisition of the pragmatics of intonation. Contrary to the expected asymmetry where comprehension precedes production, experimental evidence suggests that children can produce some intonational-pragmatic phenomena before they comprehend them. To better understand and explain the developmental asymmetry, I argue that production data may provide valuable insights into linguistic-pragmatic development, and that comprehension data may not provide a reliable source of evidence for intonational-pragmatic competence. Furthermore, I show that an interdisciplinary approach which combines theoretical insights from cognitive pragmatics, intonational phonology, and developmental pragmatics, is needed to capture differences in intonational and pragmatic requirements of phenomena to avoid conflating them in experiments. Overall, this thesis shows that children master intonation as a communicative device from early on in development, and that intonation provides young children with a linguistic device that enables them to signal and draw inferences about quite complex communicative content without relying on complex verbal abilities. This suggests that intonational competence can be used as a window into children’s early pragmatic competence.publishedVersio