Intonation of early two-word utterances in Dutch
We analysed intonation contours of two-word
utterances from three monolingual Dutch children
aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmentalmetrical
framework. Our data show that children
have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones
and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and
L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of nondownstepped
pre-nuclear pitch accents (except for
L*) at the 230-word level, contra previous claims on
the mastery of adult-like intonation contours before
or at the onset of first words. Further, there is
evidence that intonational development is correlated
with an increase in vocabulary size. Moreover, we
found that children show a preference for falling
contours, as predicted on the basis of universal
production mechanisms. In addition, the utterances
are mostly spoken with both words accented
independent of semantic relations expressed and
information status of each word across
developmental stages, contra prior work. Our study
suggests a number of topics for further research.
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