Contrastive focus in children acquiring English and ASL : cues of prominence

In this paper, we present novel data concerning the marking of contrastive focus in two modalities. Using data from an elicitation task conducted with children acquiring English and children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL), we demonstrate that focused constituents in both speech and sign modalities are marked by a bundle of prosodic features. We observe that increased duration and intensity are cross-linguistically relevant cues of contrastive focus despite the differences between the two modalities