Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by three- to six-year-old children learning Mandarin Chinese Qianyutong Zhang, Kexin Lyu, Zening Chen, Ping Tang Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China zhangqianyutong@126.com, lyukexinkkk@163.com, chenzeningxxx@163.com, ping.tang@njust.edu.cn Abstract Prosodic focus plays an important role during speech communication, delivering speakers’ pragmatical intention to emphasize key information, especially in contrastive scenarios. Previous studies exploring children’s acquisition of prosodic focus have generally focused on Germanic and Romance languages, while it was unclear when children learning Mandarin Chinese were able to correctly interpret the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus and integrate it into speech comprehension. The current study explored Mandarin- learning 3-6-year-olds’ online interpretation of prosodic focus to identify contrastive referents. Twenty 3-4-year-olds, 23 5-6- year-olds, and 22 adult controls were tested. The visual-world paradigm was adopted, where participants were instructed to search for target pictures while listening to contrastive objects in discourse sequences, e.g., Find the red cat. Now, find the PURPLE/purple cat, where the second adjective was produced with or without prosodic focus. Participants’ fixation patterns were recorded via eye-trackers. The results showed that while adults and 5-6 years showed faster fixation toward target pictures in the presence of prosodic focus, this was not the case for 3-4 years. These results indicated that Mandarin- learning children at 5-6 years have acquired the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus and utilize it to guide their identification of contrastive referents. Index Terms: prosodic focus, contrastive referents, eye- tracking, Mandarin-learning children 1. Introduction In daily speech communication, speakers tend to highlight the key information of an utterance by increasing its prosodic prominence, especially in contrastive scenarios. For example, “A: Do you want a black puppy? B: No, I want a WHITE puppy!”. In this case the speaker B emphasizes the adjective “white” in contrast to the already mentioned adjective “black”, using a series of prosodic approaches, e.g., producing it with higher overall pitch, longer duration and/or greater intensity [1-4]. To become successful communicators, children have to perceive these prosodically focused expressions and correctly interpret the pragmatic implications, e.g., the emphasized color. Studies exploring children’s comprehension of prosodic focus have primarily focused on Germanic and Romance languages, finding that it might take 3 to 6 years for children to fully acquire the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus and integrate it into speech comprehension such as identifying contrastive referents [5-7]. However, despite the fact that more than 60% of languages in the world are tonal [8], only a few studies have explored children’s acquisition of prosodic focus in tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, with various research focuses [10-12]. Therefore, the current study explored when children learning Mandarin Chinese can acquire the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus and utilize it to guide their speech comprehension. The comprehension of prosodic focus has been examined on children learning English, French, and German, while the detailed age of acquisition is contingent on the language in question and the method being used. For example, based on a sentence correction task, Szendröi et al. [5] found that, as early as 3 years old, children learning English, French or German have already shown sensitivity to prosodic prominence as a means of determining the identity of a focused subject phrase [5]. Moreover, English-learning children relied more on prosodic information in focus comprehension as compared to children learning the other two languages. Using an eye- tracking-based visual-world paradigm [9], Arnold further demonstrated that English-learning children at 4-5 years old have already shown adult-like sensitivity to accented information during their online interpretation of referential expressions [6]. However, Ito et al. found that although English-learning children at 6 years were able to use the prominence accent to facilitate their detection of contrastive referent in discourse sequences (e.g., red cat – PURPLE cat), their speed was much slower than adults even at 11 years [7]. A potential reason for their slower processing might be related to the complexity of the target picture used in [7], where 18 objects were presented simultaneously on a picture, which might be especially challenging for children to find the target object rapidly. In tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, the pitch information not only marks prosodic focus via expanding intonation contour, but also deliver lexical meaning at word level by changing its tonal identity. However, only a few studies have explored the comprehension of prosodic focus by children learning Mandarin Chinese, with various research focuses. For example, two studies compared the perceptual weight of prosody and word order in the perception of focus by Mandarin-learning 3-5 years [10, 11]. While [10] found that children mostly used word order to identify focus as compared to prosodic cues, [11] found the reversed pattern. However, none of them directly tested the role prosody played in the process of interpreting the pragmatic implicature of a focus. Zhou examined Mandarin-learning 4-5-year-old’s comprehension of prosodic information in semantic ambiguity scenarios, e.g., “Zhiyou XIAOMING de naozhong shi huangsede vs. Zhiyou Xiaoming de NAOZHONG shi huangsede” Only XIAOMING’s clock is yellow vs. Only Xiaoming’s CLOCK is yellow [12]. The results showed that these children were able to use the prosodic information to guide their interpretation of these semantical ambiguity Copyright  2021 ISCA INTERSPEECH 2021 30 August – 3 September, 2021, Brno, Czechia http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2021-316 3925