Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than duration or pitch range to signal narrow focus in French

Nuria Esteve-Gibert (1, 2) , Hélène Loevenbruck (3) , Marion Dohen (4) , Mariapaola d'Imperio (1, 5)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
2 UOC - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya [Barcelona]
3 LPNC - Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition
4 GIPSA-PCMD - GIPSA - Perception, Contrôle, Multimodalité et Dynamiques de la parole
5 Rutgers - Rutgers University System

Previous research on the development of children's marking of new referents in speech has traditionally neglected one source of relevant information: visual cues to prosodic structure. In light of previous findings showing that prosody allies with non-referential body movements in the expression of information structure, we explore whether pre-schoolers mark focused information in the discourse gesturally and/or prosodically. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audiovisually recorded while producing semi-spontaneous utterances in 3 focus conditions (broad focus; contrastive narrow focus; corrective narrow focus). The acoustic (duration and pitch range at the word level) and visual (head gestures) analyses showed a higher rate of head gesturing in the narrow focus conditions (corrective>contrastive>broad), but no effect of focus condition on word duration nor on pitch range values. These results indicate that French pre-schoolers use visual prosody to highlight new/contrastive referents in the discourse before developing the ability to use acoustic cues of prosody.

Mots clés: prosody; French intonation; narrow focus; children; head gestures

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Nuria Esteve-Gibert, Hélène Loevenbruck, Marion Dohen, Mariapaola d'Imperio. Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than duration or pitch range to signal narrow focus in French. ICPhS 2019 - 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aug 2019, Melbourne, Australia. ⟨hal-02367780⟩