Expressing information status through prosody in the spontaneous speech of American English-speaking children

Abstract

Prosody is used to express information structure and status differences in American English. For this study, our motivation was to analyze these abilities during an ecologically valid interaction where we traded control for more natural spontaneous speech. We ask how children package information when playing with their parents during exhibit exploration in a children’s museum. Specifically, we employed a MAE_ToBI analysis to look at the production of new and given information status differences during these interactions. Parent-child dyads were recorded while playing in a museum exhibit at a children’s museum. Preliminary analyses were conducted on one 4-year-old, one 5-year-old, and one 6-year-old speaker. As predicted, we found a particular set of pitch accents to be commonly found as well as considerable variation in nuclear configuration patterns due to pragmatic effects. While pitch accent types largely stayed the same over the three ages analyzed to date, the H+!H* pitch accent was only found in the speech of the 4-year-old speaker. These data continue to add to the knowledge of how pitch accent selection relates to both information status and the pragmatics of the discourse.