The prosody of early multi-word speech: word order and its intonational realization in the speech production of Italian children

The purpose of this study was to investigate, in a group of Italian children, the development of the capacity to use prosodic features to mark different syntactic organizations of multi-word utterances, during the first phase of syntactic acquisition. The focus is on the prosodic realizations of multi-word utterances in which children begin to use the argument structure of verbs (vocabulary size > 400 words, MLU range 1.3 - 3.0). Results showed that non-canonical order is not marked by specific type of intonation contours, and does not show specific values of duration, maximum and minimum FO, or key.