Clauses are perceptual units for young infants

Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathy; Nelson, Deborah G. Kemler; Jusczyk, Peter W.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Druss, Benjamin G.; Kennedy, Lori J.

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(87)80002-1

Cited by 446 publications

(254 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Of critical importance for the task of word segmentation, the larger, phrasal prosodic constituents are composed of word-like units, such that the onsets and offsets of phrasal constituents are also the beginnings and ends of words. Critically, as early as 2 mo of age, infants are sensitive to prosodic phrases (14,15), which are marked by acoustic cues like pitch lowering and durational increases (13,16). In light of the alignment of words with the edges of prosodic phrases, attention to acoustic cues signaling these phrases could serve as a potentially powerful aid to segmentation (ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants

Shukla

White

Aslin

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

158

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Human infants are predisposed to rapidly acquire their native language. The nature of these predispositions is poorly understood, but is crucial to our understanding of how infants unpack their speech input to recover the fundamental word-like units, assign them referential roles, and acquire the rules that govern their organization. Previous researchers have demonstrated the role of general distributional computations in prelinguistic infants' parsing of continuous speech. We extend these findings to more naturalistic conditions, and find that 6-mo-old infants can simultaneously segment a nonce auditory word form from prosodically organized continuous speech and associate it to a visual referent. Crucially, however, this mapping occurs only when the word form is aligned with a prosodic phrase boundary. Our findings suggest that infants are predisposed very early in life to hypothesize that words are aligned with prosodic phrase boundaries, thus facilitating the word learning process. Further, and somewhat paradoxically, we observed successful learning in a more complex context than previously studied, suggesting that learning is enhanced when the language input is well matched to the learner's expectations.A cquiring a language includes learning mappings from sounds (or signs) to meanings. However, words-the principle units of meaning-are not given directly in the input, but are embedded in a speech signal whose structure is governed by grammatical processes operating at multiple levels. One of the primary steps in language acquisition, therefore, is to discover the sound sequences that define words. However, as any adult confronted with a foreign language can attest, it is hard to perceive unfamiliar speech as sequences of words. Additionally, the language learner must also discover what the words refer to, a particularly tricky problem given the innumerable possible referential features in the world (1, 2). Nevertheless, by 6 mo of age, infants have spontaneously extracted and begun to understand their first words, including highly frequent items such as "no", "Mommy", and the child's own name (3).Here we provide evidence that 6-mo-olds can rapidly extract a statistically defined, novel auditory word form from running speech and simultaneously map it onto a visual referent in an array of objects. Moreover, we find this dual process of word segmentation and referent mapping only when the statistically defined words are aligned with phrasal prosodic constituents, a universal structural property of natural languages. These findings build on three key results from past research: (i) 7-to 8-mo-old infants can extract statistically defined syllable sequences from fluent speech as candidate auditory word forms (4, 5), (ii) by 14 mo, infants can reliably map isolated auditory word forms onto visual referents (6-8), and (iii) by 17 mo, toddlers can extract auditory word forms on the basis of syllable statistics and subsequently map them onto candidate visual referents (9). We demonstrate all of these behaviors simulta...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants

Shukla

White

Aslin

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

158

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…By 10 months of age, infants have acquired information specific to the inventory of target language segments (Werker and Tees, 1984), ordering of phones in words (Jusczyk et al, 1993b, co-occurrence of acoustic cues at linguistic boundaries (e.g. Hirsh-Pasek et al, 1987;Kemler Nelson et al, 1989;Jusczyk et al, 1992;Gerken et al, 1994), language specific stress patterns of words (Jusczyk et al, 1993a;Newsome and Jusczyk, 1994), and phrasal patterns of grammatical morphemes (Shady et al, 1994(Shady et al, , 1996Shafer et al, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given previous experiments showing longer orientation times toward natural compared to altered language stimuli, we expected infants to listen longer to grammatical strings than to ungrammatical ones (e.g. Hirsh-Pasek et al, 1987;Kemler Nelson et al, 1989;Jusczyk et al, 1992;Gerken et al, 1994;Mintz, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge

1999

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Four experiments used the head-turn preference procedure to assess whether infants could extract and remember information from auditory strings produced by a miniature artificial grammar. In all four experiments, infants generalized to new structure by discriminating new grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones after less than 2 min exposure to the grammar. Infants acquired specific information about the grammar as demonstrated by the ability to discriminate new grammatical strings from those with illegal endpoints (Experiment 1). Infants also discriminated new grammatical strings from those with string-internal pairwise violations (Experiments 2 and 3). Infants in Experiment 4 abstracted beyond specific word order as demonstrated by the ability to discriminate new strings produced by their training grammar from strings produced by another grammar despite a change in vocabulary between training and test. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of language acquisition.

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“…This process has been termed 'prosodic bootstrapping' [14]. Behavioral experiments indicate that, at around 9 months of age, infants are capable of recognizing major syntactic phrases in the acoustic input on the basis of prosodic information [15,16]. The current study explores whether infants have a neurophysiological basis similar to adults for online detection of prosodic boundaries that cue syntactic ordering principles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic processing at the sentence level in infants

2006

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We investigate whether 8 -month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as re£ecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing. The current study shows that in the event-related potentials of 8 -month-olds, a closure positive shift is elicited in relation to the prosodic boundaries in speech, suggesting that these infants are able to structure speech input into prosodic units on a neurophysiological basis similar to that seen in adults. A delay in latency of the infant closure positive shift, however, suggests that children's exploitation of prosodic boundaries for the segmentation of the speech stream is still developing. NeuroReport 17:675^678

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Clauses are perceptual units for young infants

Cited by 446 publications

References 23 publications

Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants

Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants

Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge

Prosodic processing at the sentence level in infants

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