Unbalanced adult production and perception in prosody

Previous work on the production and comprehension of focus-to-prosody mapping make different claims on the existence of a production-precedingcomprehension asymmetry in acquisition, whereby children pass through a stage of producing the right prosodic pattern but not using the focus-to-prosody mapping to the fullest extent in their comprehension, before reaching adult-like behaviour in both. The question that arises is whether there is an asymmetry in adults’ use of prosody to mark and interpret focus as well. We found that adults’ production correlated negatively with their comprehension. This puzzling result can be explained by exploring the data: many participants performed at the expected ’adult’ level in one of the two skills, but not in both. We have therefore shown for the first time that adults are not balanced in their production and comprehension of prosody, which has important implications for acquisition.