Fillers as signs of distributional learning

Abstract

A longitudinal analysis is presented of the fillers of a Dutch-speaking child between 1.10 and 2.7. Our analysis corroborates familiar regularities reported in the literature: most fillers resemble articles in shape and distribution, and are affected by rhythmic and positional constraints. A novel finding is the impact of the lexical environment: particular function words act as 'anchor' words that attract occurrences of schwa fillers after them. The child inserts significantly more schwa fillers in these contexts. The anchor words are among the most frequent words preceding articles in the input, indicating a sharp sensitivity to such distributional regularities. Nasal fillers too are affected by distributional learning, but at the phonological level: the child first uses nasals before [h]-initial nouns, and then generalizes this usage to all [h]-initial words. These observations are related to the growing body of evidence for the impact of distributional learning on early language production.

Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not

“…Rozendaal & Baker, 2008 ;Taelman et al, 2009). Thus, despite the increased complexity of the article system in Dutch relative to English, Dutch learners are similar to English learners in that they begin using these forms in word comprehension well before their second birthday.…”

“…Dutch learners' production patterns at this age are characterized by the presence of acoustically reduced proto-determiners, mostly realized as a schwa (e.g. Rozendaal & Baker, 2008 ;Taelman et al, 2009). The results of our study suggest that this lack [4] Whether this effect is grammatical in nature or whether it is a matter of local cooccurrences cannot be determined based on our results and is a question beyond the scope of this paper (see Van Heugten & Shi, 2009, for discussion).…”

“…Taelman, Durieux & Gillis, 2009 ;Rozendaal & Baker, 2008). Taelman, Durieux & Gillis, 2009 ;Rozendaal & Baker, 2008).…”

“…article use as they resemble proto-determiners, or schwa-like realizations of determiners, produced during the early stages of language production (e.g. Taelman, Durieux & Gillis, 2009 ;Rozendaal & Baker, 2008). The presence of these forms in Dutch learners' early speech may indicate that they know determiner slots should be filled with a reduced syllable.…”

A Cognitive-Pragmatic Model for the change from single-word to multiword speech: A constructivist approach

“…We assume that they are not. Before children start using multiword utterances, they can produce strings that contain more than one meaningful word, by adding "dummy forms" (e.g., Barrett, 1989;Cutler & Swinney, 1987;Dore, Franklin, Miller & Ramer, 1976;Bloom, 1973;Galligan, 1987), filler elements (Bassano & Eme, 2001;Kilani-Schoch & Dressler, 2001;López Ornat, 2001;Peters & Menn, 1993;Taelman et al, 2009;Veneziano, Sinclair & Berthoud, 1990;Veneziano & Sinclair, 2000) or produce two meaningful words articulated as a two word utterance referring however each to a different communicative intention (e.g., Veneziano et al, 1990). We suppose that conceptual and linguistic developments are needed in order to use articulatory abilites to produce multiword utterances.…”