An approach to the prosodic analysis of contrastive focus of preschool and adult Mexican Spanish speakers: data from production and perception

Abstract

Focus is usually marked at the end of phrases in Spanish, especially in its informative function. However, it can be placed in other positions of the utterance for contrasting or correcting information. Language production studies have shown that Mexican Spanish-speaking children sometimes set the prosodic focus at the beginning of sentences using prosodic cues different from those employed by adults. Based on production data, the present study evaluates the comprehension of the prosodic focus at the beginning and at the end of syntactically identical sentences by preschool Mexican Spanish-speaking children compared with adult speakers. Responses to utterances with prosodic prominence in the subject (at the beginning) and in the prepositional predicative (at the end) are acoustically analyzed, where participants correct the focalized element upon hearing wrong descriptions of a series of images. Both adults and children are expected to use different acoustic features to set the focus, depending on their perception of its position in sentences. The results showed that children and adults perceived the prosodic focus in both positions, but only children give more emphasis on the subject.