Intonation is one of the primary strategies used to express information structure in English. Typically, adult speakers will deaccent given information in discourse, while H* and L+H* pitch accents are used to represent new and contrastive information, respectively. These two pitch accents have been shown to have overlapping distributions though, with H* understood and used for both new and contrastive information and L+H* primarily for contrastive information. How do children represent new, given, and contrastive information in their own speech? The motivation for this study is to examine acoustic correlates of intonation employed by child and adult speakers of English.
