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Published on: May 15, 2019
Infants' sensitivity to non-adjacent dependencies across phonological phrase boundaries
Marieke van Heugten1, Rushen Shi
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. marieke.vanheugten@utoronto.ca
Abstract:
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.
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