Public defence: Line Sjøtun Helganger

Line Sjøtun Helganger is defending her dissertation for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

The doctoral work has been carried out at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports, and Educational Science.

You are invited to follow the trial lecture and the public defence.

• Read the full thesis here.

Summary

Most people have experienced that not only what is said but also how it is said affects utterance meaning. For instance, if a child is told by her parent to go wash her hands before having dinner, and she replies “jeg HAR vaska hendene” (‘I HAVE washed my hands’), she is signaling that contrary to what her parent seems to think, she has already washed her hands. This contradiction of her parent’s belief is expressed through the tonal movement of the utterance, or what is called intonation. 

This thesis investigates how preschool children’s ability to master intonation as a communicative device develops and what this ability can tell us about their capacity to take the perspective of others and to draw inferences about communicated content that is not explicitly expressed. The overall results of the thesis show that children master these communicative aspects of intonation from an early age, and that intonation provides young children with a linguistic device that enables them to participate in quite complex communication without having to rely on complex linguistic skills.

In our production study, we investigated Norwegian-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds’ responses in a semi-structured elicitation task. The results showed that already from the age of two, children were able to use intonation to signal whether they believed a contextually given thought to be true or false. In our comprehension study, we used a combined eye-tracking and picture selection design to investigate whether Norwegian-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds were sensitive to intonational cues when interpreting utterances containing også (‘also’), such as Jonas spiser også is (‘Jonas is also eating ice cream’). These are utterances that, depending on the intonational realization, could be taken to mean either that Jonas and someone else are eating ice cream or that Jonas is eating ice cream and something else. Results showed that sensitivity to intonational cues could be detected as early as three years of age.

The thesis also includes a paper in which I discuss a puzzling finding in the developmental literature: Contrary to the expected development where children learn to comprehend linguistic phenomena before they produce them, experimental evidence suggests that children are able to produce various intonational phenomena that they do not yet comprehend.

A central claim of the paper is that one needs to take an interdisciplinary approach when investigating the acquisition of intonational-pragmatic phenomena. Furthermore, I argue that there are reasons to believe that comprehension data may not provide a reliable source of evidence for intonational-pragmatic competence and that production data may provide valuable insights into linguistic-pragmatic development.