The sense of an ending: A case of prosodic delay

Abstract

Studies of normal and atypical prosodic development show that some children learning English invariably locate the main prosodic prominence at the end of the utterance, even though the main focus of information may come earlier. A case study is presented of David, a speech- and language-impaired child from the West Midlands of England who displayed this prosodic pattern at the age of 5, but not a year later. Since marked prosodic differences exist between the regional accent that he is exposed to and other varieties of English, David's prosodic behaviour is compared to that of adults and children speaking the same West Midlands variety. The analysis draws on techniques developed within conversation analysis to explore the relationship between prosodic detail and interactional behaviour. It is argued that, in order to maintain conversational interaction, children such as David may be using their prosodic resources to delimit unambiguously the end of their turn at talk, and that this is at the expense of clearly highlighting important or focused items of information in the utterance.

Key Words:

• prosodic development
• prosodic delay
• conversation analysis
• West Midlands dialect
• child phonology.