Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than duration or pitch range to signal narrow focus in French

International audiencePrevious research on the development of children's marking of new referents in speech has traditionally neglected one source of relevant information: visual cues to prosodic structure. In light of previous findings showing that prosody allies with non-referential body movements in the expression of information structure, we explore whether pre-schoolers mark focused information in the discourse gesturally and/or prosodically. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audiovisually recorded while producing semi-spontaneous utterances in 3 focus conditions (broad focus; contrastive narrow focus; corrective narrow focus). The acoustic (duration and pitch range at the word level) and visual (head gestures) analyses showed a higher rate of head gesturing in the narrow focus conditions (corrective>contrastive>broad), but no effect of focus condition on word duration nor on pitch range values. These results indicate that French pre-schoolers use visual prosody to highlight new/contrastive referents in the discourse before developing the ability to use acoustic cues of prosody