TY - JOUR
T1 - When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure
T2 - 9-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases
AU - Gerken, Lou Ann
AU - Jusczyk, Peter W.
AU - Mandel, Denise R.
N1 - Funding Information: This research was supported in part by an NSF grant (DBS91020952) to L.A.G. and an NIH grant (HD-15795) to P.W.J. We thank Ann Marie Jusczyk and Nancy Redanz for their help in testing subjects, Stephen Yeoh for his assistance in programming the experiment, and Lila Gleitman, Deborah Kemler Nelson, Elissa Newport, Alice Turk, Irene Vogel and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.
PY - 1994/3
Y1 - 1994/3
N2 - According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP conditio, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine of other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.
AB - According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP conditio, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine of other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.
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U2 - 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90055-8
DO - 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90055-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 8194302
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 51
SP - 237
EP - 265
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -