Auch and noch in child and adult German

This empirical study explores the early acquisition of "auch" (also) and "noch" (also/still) in German, alongside their adult usage in spoken language. It addresses how children learn these additive particles and examines adult usage to understand the input children receive. Previous research on focus particles in adult German primarily focused on semantic and syntactic properties of constructed examples. This study, based on various corpora of spoken German, is the first to comprehensively analyze natural language data, including the intonation of focus particle utterances and their semantic, syntactic, and information structural aspects. The child data is derived from an extensive longitudinal corpus of one German child, set against the backdrop of adult data, offering a detailed characterization of the acquisition process. This includes insights from earlier studies on focus particle comprehension. Additionally, the author introduces an analysis that distinguishes between stressed and unstressed particles, making the work relevant not just for language acquisition and psycholinguistics researchers, but also for those interested in phonology/prosody, semantics, syntax, and information structure.