Prosodic stress on a word directs 24-month-olds’ attention to a contextually new referent

From the very beginning of language acquisition, young children are sensitive to what is given versus what is new in their discourse with others. Here we ask whether 24-month-olds use this skill to interpret prosodic highlighting as an invitation to focus their attention on what is new in the situation. Using an eye-tracking methodology, we compared children's visual fixation of referents that were given versus those that were new in the situation when the prosodic highlighting of their corresponding word varied. Results showed that 24-month-old children looked longer to the referents of prosodically stressed words when those referents were new to the context. Neither stress of the word alone nor newness of the referent alone was sufficient to induce children to focus their attention on the target referent. These results suggest that from an early age children understand at least one important communicative function of prosodic stress.