Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds

Millotte, Séverine; Morgan, James L.; Margules, Sylvie; Bernal, Savita; Dutat, Michel; Christophe, Anne

doi:10.5334/jpl.101

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…A long series of studies shows that infants develop an impressive expertise with prosody from their first days of life. Newborns are able to exploit rhythmic information to discriminate between languages (Mehler et al, 1988;Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998); from 4.5 months onwards, infants are sensitive to the coherence of prosodic constituents (Gerken, Jusczyk, & Mandel, 1994;Hirsh-Pasek et al, 1987;Jusczyk, Hohne, & Mandel, 1995;Männel & Friederici, 2009;Soderstrom, Seidl, Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2003), they show better recognition and memory for segments that correspond to whole prosodic units than for those which span prosodic boundaries (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Nelson, 1994;Nazzi, Iakimova, Bertoncini, Frédonie, & Alcantara, 2006) and they can rely on prosodic cues to segment the speech stream into words and constrain their lexical access (Gout, Christophe, & Morgan, 2004;Johnson, 2008;Millotte et al, 2010;Shukla, White, & Aslin, 2011). All of these findings, together with the reliable relationship between prosodic and syntactic structures, suggest that toddlers might be able to use phrasal prosody, not only to facilitate memory and lexical access, but also to constrain their syntactic analysis (see Christophe et al, 2008;Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014;Massicotte-Laforge & Shi, 2015;Morgan & Demuth, 1996;Morgan, 1986;Shi, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

et al. 2017

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This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébésouris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourità sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

et al. 2017

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“…For example, infants exploit phrasal prosody to identify their mother tongue from birth onwards (e.g. Mehler, Jusczyk, Lamsertz, Halsted, Bertoncini et al ., ; Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, ), they are sensitive to the coherence of prosodic constituents (at 4 months, for intonational phrases; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss et al ., ; from 6 months on, for smaller prosodic units; Gerken, Jusczyk & Mandel, ; Soderstrom, Seidl, Nelson & Jusczyk, ), they show better memory for whole prosodic units than for chunks that span prosodic boundaries (Mandel, Jusczyk & Nelson, ; Nazzi, Iakimova, Bertoncini & Alcantara, ) and they use prosodic boundaries to constrain lexical access by 10 months of age (Gout, Christophe & Morgan, ; Johnson, ; Millotte, Margules, Dutat, Bernal & Christophe, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Carvalho

Dautriche

Christophe

2015

Developmental Science

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Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est très jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenêtre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.

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“…Furthermore, EP sound structure offers stronger cues for word segmentation than those available in other Romance languages, although weaker then in English (Vigário, 2003). These and other languagespecific patterns may impact on the acquisition of words and related language development (Demuth, 2006;Millotte et al, 2010;Vigário et al, 2006).…”

Section: ) and Galicianmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, some languages have shown a different pace in development, e.g., Danish and French children exhibit a slower pace, and American English children show a faster pace in development (Bleses et al, 2008;Millotte et al, 2010;Wehberg et al, 2007). It has been hypothesized that at least some of these differences might be related to linguistic factors, namely to aspects of sound structure like strong reduction in Danish and absence of word boundary cues in French (but see Hamilton et al, 2000 for the potential role of social/cultural variables).…”

Section: ) and Galicianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms

et al. 2016

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This article describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production of morphologically complex words and word combinations. Significant effects of gender were found for early word comprehension and production, as well as for toddlers' word production, word complexity and word combinations, with a consistent advantage for girls. By contrast, effects of socioeconomic status were limited to early word comprehension. A cross-language comparison with short form data for other languages was performed. Differences across languages only emerged for toddlers. However, effects of gender were found independently of language differences.

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Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds

Cited by 12 publications

References 40 publications

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms

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