The Acquisition of Focal Lengthening in Stockholm Swedish

In order to be efficient communicators, children need to adapt their utterances to the common ground shared between themselves and their conversational partners. One way of doing this is by prosodically highlighting focal information. In this paper we look at one specific prosodic manipulation, namely word duration, asking whether Swedish-speaking children lengthen words to mark focus, as compared to adult controls. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the relationship between focus and word duration in Swedish-speaking children.