Research project Learning to focus – How Swedish children produce and comprehend contrastive intonation

People use prosody – the melody and rhythm of speech – to highlight the most important part of an utterance (its focus), and rely on prosody to comprehend the message. Prosodic focusing takes different forms in different languages or dialects.

We investigate effects of such differences on children’s development toward adult mastery of focus prosody comparing Stockholm and Skåne Swedish which differ in prosodic typology, while keeping other important linguistic features constant. We will record young children and adults speaking these varieties, and test their comprehension using eye tracking.

Our research questions center on the relation between how a child produces focus prosody, and how it can make use of it in speech comprehension. Is one acquired before the other? Is their acquisition influenced by the melodic shape of the variety's particular focus prosody? The project will add to our general understanding of how input properties affect language acquisition.