The prosody of early multy-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, F0 max, F0 min or key. On the other hand, when the (optional) subject is expressed in canonical utterances it is very frequently marked by primary stress.