When Do Universal Preferences Emerge in Language Development? The Acquisition of Hebrew Stress

Abstract

When children have to select one of two structures, do they start with the universally unmarked structure or with the one preferred by the ambient language? Th is question is directly relevant to metrical systems, which often employ either iambs or the universally unmarked trochees. We argue that children start with the universally unmarked trochaic foot, unless their ambient language provides them with suffi cient data to arrive at the language-specifi c preferred foot prior to the onset of speech. We show that Hebrew-acquiring children, unlike French ones, are exposed to ambiguous data, which do not allow them to determine the type of foot the language's stress system employs. Our quantitative data provide evidence that in such a case, children adhere to the trochaic foot during the very early stage of acquisition (in the case study presented here, the early stage of acquisition refers to the fi rst 100 cumulative target words). Later on, children follow the frequency-based preference in Hebrew, where fi nal stress, and thus the iambic foot is employed in about 75% of the nouns.

Gestures and Words in Naming: Evidence From Crosslinguistic and Crosscultural Comparison

“…The course of oral language development itself, which is, as we have seen, closely linked to gestural development, can vary greatly depending on the language being learned. Such language‐specific effects on learning are found for early phonological processing and lexical–prosodic processing influencing vocabulary growth (see Adam & Bat‐El, ; Bleses et al., ; Bouchon, Floccia, Fux, Adda‐Decker, & Nazzi, ; Delle Luche, Floccia, Granjon, & Nazzi, ; Höhle, Bijeljac‐Babic, Herold, Weissenborn, & Nazzi, ; Nazzi, Floccia, Moquet, & Butler, ; Thordardottir, ). In the aforementioned context, it is difficult to conclude whether differences in gestural use observed in crosscultural studies (e.g., Iverson et al., ) are due to cultural environments (such as a rich gestural model from adults, for example), or differences in language growth, which then cascade onto differences in gestural development.…”

I: Introduction

“…There is growing evidence that, according to the language they acquire, monolinguals' learning paths can differ, including for early lexical prosodic processing (Adam & Bat-El, 2009), word segmentation (across dialects: Nazzi, Mersad, Sundara, Iakimova, & Polka, 2014), and phonological processing (Nazzi, Floccia, Moquet, & Butler, 2009;Mani & Plunkett, 2007;Delle Luche, Floccia, Granjon, & Nazzi, 2016;Bouchon, Floccia, Fux, Adda-Decker, & Nazzi, 2015), culminating in differences in vocabulary growth (Bleses et al, 2008;Thordardottir, 2005). Bilingualism is likely to exacerbate these languagespecific differences, adding not only a new language but also the complexity of interactions between languages.…”

Discrepancy between heritage speakers' use of suprasegmental cues in the perception and production of Spanish lexical stress

“…Although the question of whether infants' initial biases for a certain stress pattern is universal is not central to this study, it is important to note that contradictory evidence has been found in this topic. See Rose and Champoizea (2007) and Adam and Bat-El (2007) for further discussion on the subject.…”