Intonation is one of the primary strategies used to express information structure in English. Typically, adult speakers 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. The motivation for this study is to examine how adult and toddler (2;6) speakers of English represent new, given, and contrastive information both phonologically and acoustic-phonetically. During a spontaneous speech task designed as an interactive game, a set of target nouns were elicited as one of three types (new, given or contrastive). Each target word was phonologically labeled with a pitch accent, and the acoustic features of duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity measures were extracted. Results demonstrate that pitch accent distribution and frequencies were similar across child and adult speakers for new and contrastive productions. Also, as predicted by the literature, children show less deaccentuation than adults for given utterances. Analyses of duration, maximum F0, mean F0, and maximum intensity for each of the three types of accentuation (deaccented, H* and L+H*) reveal that children as young as 2;6 implement acoustic correlates of intonation in patterns comparable to those of adults.
