Production-Comprehension (A)symmetry: Individual Differences in the acquisition of prosodic focus-marking

Previous work based on different groups of children has shown that four- to five-year-old children are
similar to adults in both producing and comprehending the focus-to-accentuation mapping in Dutch, contra
the alleged production-precedes-comprehension asymmetry in earlier studies. In the current study,
we addressed the question of whether there are individual differences in the production-comprehension
(a)symmetricity. To this end, we examined the use of prosody in focus marking in production and the
processing of focus-related prosody in online language comprehension in the same group of 4- to 5-yearolds.
We have found that the relationship between comprehension and production can be rather diverse
at an individual level. This result suggests some degree of independence in learning to use prosody to
mark focus in production and learning to process focus-related prosodic information in online language
comprehension, and implies influences of other linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the productioncomprehension
(a)symmetricity.