Phonetic implementation of contrastive focus in children’s speech: a look at instabilities in the prosodic acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese
Abstract
This study aimed to describe the phonetic implementation of contrastive prosodic focus on the speech of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speaking children. This was achieved by comparing the variation of acoustic parameters. The following hypotheses were assumed: (i) focus production would be marked by duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity; (ii) syntactic position would affect phonetic prosodic focus phonetic implementation; and (iii) differences between age groups would be observed. Thirty children, organized into two age groups (4-6 and 7-9 years old), participated in an experiment whose task elicited utterances with contrastive focus. Acoustical analysis was performed on these utterances, measuring values for fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity. On the one hand, results showed that children discriminate contrastive focus and broad focus using parameters considered robust for BP. On the other hand, results indicate that phonetic implementation of focus was sensitive to the syntactic position, with the subject position proving the most challenging. Finally, the age groups differed in phonetic implementation, with children aged 4-6 years relying less on duration and more on intensity than those aged 7-9 years, while fundamental frequency marked focus production in the speech of both groups. We conclude that instabilities characterize the acquisition process. These instabilities are attributable both to structural factors and the functional refinement of phonetic prosodic parameters.
Downloads
References
Arvaniti, A., & Fletcher, J. (2020). The autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational phonology. In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language prosody (pp. 78-95). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832232.013.5
Barbosa, P. (2012). Conhecendo melhor a prosódia: Aspectos teóricos e metodológicos daquilo que molda nossa enunciação. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 20(1),11-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.20.1.11-27
Barbosa, P., & Madureira, S. (2015). Manual de fonética acústica experimental: aplicações a dados do português. Cortez.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2022). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer software]. https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Carnaval, M. (2021). Focalização no português do Brasil: Um estudo multimodal [Tese de doutorado, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro]. https://buscaintegrada.ufrj.br/Record/aleph-UFR01-000926015
Chen, A., Esteve-Gibert, N., Prieto, P., & Redford, M. A. (2020). Development of phrase-level prosody from infancy to late childhood. In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language prosody (pp. 553–562). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832232.013.35
Chen, A. (2009). The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch. In M. C. Vigario, S. Frota, & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology: Interactions and interrelations (pp. 91–106). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.306.05che
Chen, A. (2010). Is there really an asymmetry in the acquisition of the focus-to-accentuation mapping? Lingua, 120(8), 1926–1939. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.02.012
Chen, A. (2018). Get the focus right across languages: Acquisition of prosodic focus-marking in production. In P. Prieto & N. Esteve-Gibert (Eds.), The development of prosody in first language acquisition (pp. 223-244). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.15che
Diehl, J. J. &, Paul, R. (2009). The assessment and treatment of prosodic disorders and neurological theories of prosody. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 11(4), 287-292. http://doi.org/10.1080/17549500902971887
Filipe, M. G., Peppé, S., Frota, S., & Vicente, S. G. (2017). Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(5), 1045–1070. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716417000030
Frota, S., Cruz, M., Svartman, F., Collischonn, G., Fonseca, A., Serra, C., Oliveira, P., & Vigário, M. (2015). Intonational variation in Portuguese: European and Brazilian varieties. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance (pp. 235–283). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685332.003.0007
Gussenhoven, C. (2008). Types of focus in English. In C. Lee, M. Gordon, & D. Büring (Eds.), Topic and focus (Vol. 82, pp. 141–157). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4796-1_5
Halliday, M. A. K. (1970). Language structure and language function. In J. Lyons (Ed.), New horizons in linguistics (pp. 140-165). Penguin.
Ito, K. (2014). Children’s pragmatic use of prosodic prominence. In D. Matthews (Ed.), Pragmatic development in first language acquisition (pp. 199-218). John Benjamins Publishing.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. MIT Press.
Krifka, M. (2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55(3-4), 243-276. https://doi.org/10.1556/ALing.55.2008.3-4.2
Ladd, D. R. (1980). The structure of intonational meaning: Evidence from English. Indiana University Press.
Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge University Press.
Leite, D. R. (2009). Estudo prosódico sobre as manifestações de foco [Dissertação de Mestrado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais].
Martínez-Castilla, P., & Peppé, S. (2008). The prosody of focus in Spanish: The case of contrastive focus. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008 (pp. 255–258). International Speech Communication Association.
Moraes, J. A. (2009). Three types of prosodic focus in Brazilian Portuguese: Form and meaning. In Workshop on Prosody and Meaning Abstracts (pp. 59–60). Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Müller, A., Höhle, B., Schmitz, M., & Weissenborn, J. (2006). Focus-to-stress alignment in 4- to 5-year-old German-learning children. In Proceedings of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference 2005 (pp. 393–407). University of Potsdam.
Peppé, S., & McCann, J. (2003). Assessing intonation and prosody in children with atypical language development: The PEPS-C test and the revised version. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 17(4–5), 345–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/0269920031000079994
Peppé, S. J. E., Martínez-Castilla, P., Coene, M., Hesling, I., Moen, I., & Gibbon, F. (2010). Assessing prosodic disorder in five European languages. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549500903093731
Prieto, P., & Esteve-Gibert, N. (Eds.). (2018). The development of prosody in first language acquisition. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Roberts, C. (2012). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics, 5. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6
Romøren, A. S. &, Chen, A. (2021). The acquisition of prosodic marking of narrow focus in Central Swedish. Journal of Child Language, 49(2), 213-238. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000847
Santos, K. A. dos, Pinheiro, P. I. R., Guida, C. L. S., & Soncin, G. (2023). Focalização prosódica na fala de crianças com desenvolvimento fonológico típico e atípico: análise duracional. Veredas: Revista de Estudos Linguísticos, 27(1), e40928. https://doi.org/10.34019/1982-2243.2023.v27.40928
Serra, C., Callou, D., & Moraes, J. A. de. (2013). A interface fonologia e sintaxe: prosódia e posição do adjetivo. Letras de Hoje, 48(4), 549–556. https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/fale/article/view/14011
Soncin, G., Guida, C. L. S., Lima, F. L. C. N., & Berti, L. C. (2024). Diferenças na produção de foco prosódico contrastivo na fala de adultos e de crianças com aquisição fonológica típica e atípica do PB. Filologia e Linguística Portuguesa, 26(2), 375–395. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2176-9419.v26i2p375-395
Soncin, G., Pinheiro, P., Guida, C., Santos, K. A., & Freitas, T. (2022). Duração como correlato acústico de foco prosódico no Português do Brasil: Estudo comparativo entre adultos e crianças com desenvolvimento fonológico atípico. Anais do Congresso Brasileiro de Prosódia, 2.
Souza, N. E. V. (2020). Perfil das habilidades prosódicas em crianças e adolescentes com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem [Dissertação de mestrado, Universidade de Brasília].
Terken, J. &, Hermes, D. (2000). The perception of prosodic prominence. In M. Horne (Ed.), Prosody: Theory and experiment. Studies presented to Gösta Bruce. (pp. 89-127). Springer.
Wells, B., Peppé, S., & Goulandris, N. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31(4), 749–778. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500090400652X
Wonnacott, E. &, Watson, D. G. (2008). Acoustic emphasis in four-year-olds. Cognition, 107(3), 1093-1101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.10.005
Yang, A. &, Chen, A. (2018). The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children. First Language, 38(1), 26–46. http://doi.org/10.1177/0142723717733920
Yano, C. T. &, Svartman, F. F. (2020). Um estudo preliminar sobre a prosódia de construções com tópico e foco no português paulista. Entrepalavras, 10(1), 256-282. http://dx.doi.org/10.22168/2237-6321-11724
Copyright (c) 2025 Geovana Soncin , Cecília Lorena Silva Guida, Fernanda Leitão de Castro Nunes de Lima
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY AND COPYRIGHTS
I Declare that current article is original and has not been submitted for publication, in part or in whole, to any other national or international journal.
The copyrights belong exclusively to the authors. Published content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) guidelines, which allows sharing (copy and distribution of the material in any medium or format) and adaptation (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, even commercially, under the terms of attribution.
Read this link for further information on how to use CC BY 4.0 properly.
6.png){kind=logo}
