This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

本研究调查了儿童在匈牙利语中对韵律焦点的识别，这是一种强制性的句法焦点标记语言。假设常规句法焦点标记减少了韵律标记在习得中的消歧作用，我们预计，在仅通过韵律消除焦点的句子中，与日耳曼语和浪漫语相比，成人对韵律焦点标记的理解应该延迟以前使用我们采用的相同实验方法研究的语言。我们的结果证实了这一预测，表明对韵律焦点标记的理解的发展轨迹可能会受到焦点标记中跨语言语法变化的重大影响。