Infants' sensitivity to non-adjacent dependencies across phonological phrase boundaries.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Natural languages contain numerous non-adjacent relationships between words or morphemes in a sentence, often straddling phonological phrase boundaries (e.g., [these sheep] [have [ellipsis (horizontal)]]). Since phonological phrases are considered the main processing unit for infants, this may cause the acquisition of cross-phrase dependencies to be challenging. This study, however, shows that by 17 months of age, French-learning infants have nonetheless gained sensitivity to remote determiner-auxiliary co-occurrences that are interceded by phonological phrase boundaries. Infants thus possess a robust mechanism for tracking non-adjacent dependencies. This ability is essential for early grammatical development.
منابع مشابه
Sensitivity to Non-adjacent Phonological Dependencies in 10-Month-Old Infants
Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, holding between adjacent or nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonotactics, while sensitivity to adjacent dependencies emerges between 6 and 10 months, it is unknown when sensitivity to nonadjacent dependencies emerges. The present study tests a perceptual equivalent of the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, a dependency involving two non-...
متن کاملDownstep in Tswana (Southern Bantu)
The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...
متن کاملTracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French.
This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent 'the boy(s) read(s)') where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-ve...
متن کاملPhonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access II. Infant data
The location of phonological phrase boundaries was shown to affect lexical access by English-learning infants of 10 and 13 months of age. Experiments 1 and 2 used the head-turn preference procedure: infants were familiarized with two bisyllabic words, then presented with sentences that either contained the familiarized words or contained both their syllables separated by a phonological phrase b...
متن کاملCan prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech?
We tested whether adult listeners can simultaneously keep track of variations in pitch and syllable duration in order to segment continuous speech into phrases and group these phrases into sentences. The speech stream was constructed so that prosodic cues signaled hierarchical structures (i.e., phrases embedded within sentences) and non-adjacent relations (i.e., AxB rules within phrases), while...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
دوره 128 5 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2010