Special Sessions

Prosodic marking of information structure in language learners: Prosody and beyond

Organizers:

Pilar Prieto (ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Aoju Chen (Utrecht University)

Júlia Florit-Pons (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Prosody, and especially prosodic prominence, is used in many languages of the world to encode information structure. From a language learning perspective, despite the fact that prosody has been highlighted as a strong bootstrapping element of early language development, less is known about how prosody and other multimodal strategies are used by child and adult language learners to mark information structure in discourse. This special session invites submissions addressing the learning of under-studied aspects of the prosody-information structure interface (e.g., referential given-new, building dependencies between a referent and its antecedent via prosody) across languages and the co-use of prosody and other cues (i.e. morphosyntactic cues, gestures) in both production and comprehension. Attention will also be paid to methodological issues such as elicitation instruments and information structure categorization schemes.