Prosodic patterns in child speech

This paper presents an experimental study contributing to the issue of prosodysyntax-semantics interaction in child speech. The data from 12 3-4-year-old children acquiring Ukrainian have been analyzed in order to establish main prosodic patterns associated with different semantic types of SVO and SOV sentences. The results show that the children are mostly adult-like in the prosodic realization of post-verbal object pronouns, but often apply non-adult-like prosodic contours to the sentences with contextually-dependent object NPs.