Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese–Italian cross-linguistic study

Gervain, Judit; Nespor, Marina; Mazuka, Reiko; Horie, Ryota; Mehler, Jacques

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001

Cited by 135 publications

(190 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…3; for further details see also ref. 6). Frequent words (for example, 'fi') were nine times more frequent than infrequent ones (for example, 'ra').…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, in Experiment 2, we tested 7-month-old monolingual English-exposed infants using the OV prosody condition of Experiment 1, that is, a prosody unfamiliar to the infants, as well as in a no prosody control (the same artificial grammar with no pitch or durational cues, that is, constant pitch of 200 Hz and constant duration of 120 ms, as in ref. 6). The familiar VO prosody condition was not tested.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Monolingual infants can use functors as anchors to segment speech into syntactically relevant chunks, from which the basic word order of a language might be deduced 6,7 . Functors provide a reliable, systematic and easily recognizable signal, because they are more frequent than content words 6,8 and they have distinct perceptual characteristics [9][10][11][12][13] .…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Functors provide a reliable, systematic and easily recognizable signal, because they are more frequent than content words 6,8 and they have distinct perceptual characteristics [9][10][11][12][13] . Further, the relative order of function words and content words strongly correlates with basic word order 5 .…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, tracking the positions of the most frequent words in the input can help infants acquire more general knowledge about word order. Indeed, after several months of experience with their native language, Italian infants parse a continuous artificial speech stream with alternating frequent and infrequent words into chunks starting with a frequent word, followed by an infrequent word, mirroring the function wordinitial word order of Italian (a Roma 'to/in Rome'), whereas Japanese infants prefer the opposite, function word-final order, characteristic of Japanese (Tōkyō ni 'Tokyo to') 6 .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants

2013

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A central problem in language acquisition is how children effortlessly acquire the grammar of their native language even though speech provides no direct information about underlying structure. This learning problem is even more challenging for dual language learners, yet bilingual infants master their mother tongues as efficiently as monolinguals do. Here we ask how bilingual infants succeed, investigating the particularly challenging task of learning two languages with conflicting word orders (English: eat an apple versus Japanese: ringo-wo taberu 'apple.acc eat'). We show that 7-month-old bilinguals use the characteristic prosodic cues (pitch and duration) associated with different word orders to solve this problem. Thus, the complexity of bilingual acquisition is countered by bilinguals' ability to exploit relevant cues. Moreover, the finding that perceptually available cues like prosody can bootstrap grammatical structure adds to our understanding of how and why infants acquire grammar so early and effortlessly.

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“…3; for further details see also ref. 6). Frequent words (for example, 'fi') were nine times more frequent than infrequent ones (for example, 'ra').…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%