A CASE STUDY OF PROSODIC PHRASAL GROUPING AND INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Abstract

In language acquisition, children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances. In line with that, as a case study in this research, I analyze two particular aspects of prosody in a child’s language acquisition, i.e. prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence. In the first aspect, I investigate whether the child uses prosodic phrases to group words together into interpretable units. In the second aspect, I analyze whether the child uses intonational prominence to focus marking prosody. The result indicates that both aspects are used by the child.

Keywords

• language acquisition
• prosody
• intonation
• phonetic cues