The Production-Comprehension Relationship in the Acquisition of Prosodic Focus Marking: The Role of Age and Individual Differences

Central to the debate on the production–comprehension relationship in prosodic development is the acquisition of the focus-to-prosody mapping in West Germanic languages. Past research primarily examined the production–comprehension relationship in 4- to 5-year-old English and Dutch-speaking children and yielded evidence both for and against a production-precedes-comprehension asymmetry. Recent research shows a protracted developmental trajectory to adult-like use of the full range of prosodic means for focus marking in Dutch-speaking children, suggesting a comprehension-precedes-production asymmetry. Little is known about whether the production–comprehension relationship changes with age and differs between children. To elucidate the effect of age on the production–comprehension relationship and shed initial light on individual differences in this domain, we investigated production and comprehension of the focus-to-prosody mapping in SVO sentences by 71 Dutch-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years, using picture-based production and online comprehension tasks. Multilevel modelling showed that the children’s comprehension was predictive of their production in sentence-initial focus but not in sentence-final focus across ages. However, this predictive relationship between comprehension and production differed for different children depending on whether their comprehension was adult-like. In conclusion, we have found limited evidence that children’s comprehension of the focus-to-prosody mapping supports their use of prosody to mark focus in production. The stability of individual differences across development is similar to findings in other domains of language acquisition.