Information Structural Constraints on Children's Early Language Production: The Acquisition of the Focus Particle auch ('also') in German-Learning 12- to 36-Month-Olds  

Oleh:

Muller, Anja ; Hohle, Barbara ; Schmitz, Michaela ; Weissenborn, Jurgen

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: First Language (Full Text) vol. 29 no. 4 (Nov. 2009), page 373-399.
Topik: Focus particles; information structure; prosody; speech production; topic drop
Fulltext: Vol 29, no (4), page 373–399.pdf (370.08KB)

Isi artikel

This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experi ments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children’s production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-variants. Based on the empirical findings, an account for this asymmetry is proposed that relates it to a more general developmental tendency that is characterized by a growing linguistic explicitness in embedding a given utterance in its discourse context. It is suggested that the observed delay is caused by the type of relation between the particle and its related constituent: in contrast to the accented auch the unaccented auch is anaphorically related to the sentence topic. It is proposed that the initial omission reflects a general tendency in early child language to drop topic material.

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