Our knowledge about the acquisition of intonation patterns during language
development is rather scarce. The production of interrogatives is a specific
phenomenon within this process, as each type can be characterized by a different prosodic
structure. In case of reading, the level of reading practice might
also affect prosodic formation. In the present study, we examined the intonation characteristics
of interrogatives in third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children. We hypothesized that
the implementation of intonation structures is
related to the reader’s practice, and patterns that are considered to be prototypical
among adults become characteristic after fourth grade. The results,
however, showed that children mastered the schematic intonation contours of
the question types by third grade, and these were applied even if the reading
abilities appeared to be underdeveloped. Compared to the previous literature,
in intonation patterns a similar degrees of variance and similar intonation
patterns were revealed as in adults. In connection with this, it was revealed that
in Wh-question realizations, the final rise is a prototypical pattern among
children, similarly to adults, and its frequency is not independent of the structural
and semantic–pragmatic features of the sentence.