Linked Life Data

8194302

Source:http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/id/8194302

Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
3
pubmed:dateCreated
1994-6-27
pubmed:abstractText
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 condition, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine if 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.
pubmed:grant
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
C
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Mar
pubmed:issn
0010-0277
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
51
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
237-65
pubmed:dateRevised
2007-11-14
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
1994
pubmed:articleTitle
When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases.
pubmed:affiliation
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo 14260.
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article, Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S., Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.