Young Children’s Intonational Marking of New, Given and Contrastive Referents

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children’s and adults’ intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and adults distinguished these elements with different pitch accents. Adults, however, de-accented Given information much more often than the children, especially the younger children. Since a failure to de-accent Given information may be a characteristic of caregiver speech, in a second study we tested how caregivers talking to their young children realize Given and New referents. In this discourse situation, the caregivers quite often failed to de-accent Given information, raising the possibility that the younger children were simply reproducing the pitch accents they had heard adults using.