Use of secondary cues in prosodic focus marking in speech of children with phonological disorder

This paper presents an acoustic description of prosodic focus marking in speech of children with phonological disorder to identify which phonetic cues can be seen as markers of contrastive focus. The data was obtained in speech evaluation sessions through a task of repeating focus marking sentences. Duration, intensity and intonation on focused words were the phonetic cues under analysis. Results show that prosodic focus marking in speech of children with phonological disorder is characterized by increased duration and intensity, but is not characterized by the use of contrastive focus marking nuclear accent. These results are discussed considering, on one hand, the combination of phonetic cues relevant for characterizing the production of contrastive focus and, on the other hand, its clinical implications. We present contributions for both linguistic and clinical studies in language acquisition