Prosody and Syntax

Prosodic properties of sentence or phrase pronunciation are often dependent on the syntactic structure of the phrase or sentence. Little is known about how children learn to connect prosody and syntax (or semantics), and to what extent they are able to use prosodic information in comprehension or productions. We are currently looking at the following questions:

• How do Mandarin speaking children acquire Tone 3 sandhi?
• Can children use prosodic information to disambiguate sentence structure or meaning?