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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
The role of prosody in infants' early syntactic analysis and grammatical categorization
Sarah Massicotte-Laforge1, Rushen Shi1
1Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3P8, Canadamassicotte-laforge.sarah@courrier.uqam.ca, shi.rushen@uqam.ca.
Abstract:
This study tested the hypothesis that phrasal prosody assists early syntactic acquisition. Stimulus-sentences consisting of French determiners and pseudo-lexical-words were ambiguous between two syntactic structures, e.g., [[TonDet felliAdj craleN]NP [vurV laDet gosineN]VP] versus [[TonDet felliN]NP [craleV vurPrep laDet gosineN]VP], which had distinct prosodic cues. French-learning 20-month-olds were familiarized with the sentences either in the prosody of one structure, or the other structure. All infants were tested with Det + N (e.g., LeDet craleN) versus Pron + V (e.g., TuPron cralesV) trials containing non-familiarized functors. Infants perceived the test-stimuli according to the familiarized structure. They used prosody to categorize words and interpret adjacent and non-adjacent syntactic dependencies.
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