Dialogue-bound processing of pragmatic and prosodic information in children and adults: Investigations with event-related potentials and pupillometric measures

<p>The acquisition and control of the native language by adolescents are central for the successful accomplishment of school requirements and the later vocational career. Spoken dialogues between two or several conversation partners are the most frequent and most important form of communication between humans. In contrast to written language, spoken dialogues contain additional prosodic information, i.e. the speech-accompanying melody. The project explores the development of the dialogue-bound processing of pragmatic and prosodic information in adolescents at the age of 5, 8 and 12 years (and a control group of adults). The language materials in use will consist of child-appropriate dialogues with differing contextually-pragmatically specified information centres, which are either adequately or inadequately reflected in the prosody of the dialogues.</p>
<p>The ability to extract central dialogue-bound information independently from the prosodic realization develops only with increasing age. This trend is to be determined with the help of neurophysiological methods (EEG, Pupillometrie). First a purely prosodic interpretation of the dialogues (5 years) is assumed, which is replaced increasingly by the interpretation of new information on the basis of foreknowledge (8 years). Only at the age of 12 years, children show a pattern of the interactive processing similar to that of adults, i.e. the pragmatic information focus lies in the center of attention both in the interpretation of newer and of corrected information.</p>