The prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: Evidence from prelinguistic infants
Section snippets
Experiment 1
Following Jusczyk et al.’s (1992) success in demonstrating sensitivity to cues marking major phrase boundaries in 9 month olds, Experiment 1 explores whether 9 month olds actually deploy this sensitivity to cues internal to the clause in their processing of fluent speech. This effort is encouraged by Nazzi et al.’s (2000) suggestion that even 6 month olds make use of prosodic cues correlated with clauses in speech processing. Still, there are reasons to question whether a parallel effect will
Experiment 2
In Experiment 1, 9 month olds demonstrated a preference for the passage with the well-formed version of a noun-phrase (NP) word sequence over a phonologically matching non-unit (NU) version after familiarization with both. This suggests that 9-month-old infants sometimes use phrase-level prosodic cues in segmenting continuous speech. If 6 month olds also use prosodic cues in this way, then they too should show a preference for the passage containing a familiarized NP target sequence over a
General discussion
The results reported in this paper constitute the first evidence that syntactically influenced prosodic cues may affect infants’ recognition of major phrasal units embedded within continuous passages of speech. In several significant instances, infants preferred passages containing a familiar phonological sequence when this sequence constituted a well-formed phrasal unit (NP or VP) than when it crossed the subject/VP boundary and constituted a syntactic non-unit. Furthermore, while previous
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Research Grant from NICHD (15795) and a Senior Scientist Award from NIMH (01490) to P.W.J., a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to M.S., an IGERT postdoctoral fellowship to A.S., and a Swarthmore College sabbatical award to D.G.K.N. Thanks are due to Ann Marie Jusczyk and Natasha Henline for their help and support in recruiting and running subjects, to Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel for advice on the presentation of the intonation data and
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2022, CognitionCitation Excerpt :Second, within-utterance prosodic breaks may be difficult to detect in the raw signal, yielding segmentation errors. Laboratory evidence suggests infants typically require multiple acoustic cues (pitch reset, preboundary lengthening, and pause) to detect a break (Seidl, 2007; Soderstrom, Seidl, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2003; Wellmann et al., 2012), with the possible exception of long pauses (E. Johnson & Seidl, 2008). Also adults are better at discovering breaks when these are more strongly marked (e.g., discussions in E. Johnson & Seidl, 2008 and Wellmann et al., 2012).
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2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :The work of Jusczyk et al. (1992) and Hirsh-Pasek et al. (1987), for instance, shows that by 7 months of age, infants can identify prosodic phrasal boundaries, and pay more attention to recorded stories in which pauses are inserted correctly at those boundaries, as opposed to within the prosodic phrases. Infants have also been shown to understand, from 6 months onwards, that words cannot span prosodic boundaries, i.e., that there cannot be a word which starts in a prosodic phrase but ends in a different phrase (e.g., Gout et al., 2004; Shukla et al., 2011; Soderstrom et al., 2003). Studies such as the ones mentioned above corroborate the Prosodic Bootstrapping hypothesis (e.g. Christophe et al., 2008; Christophe et al., 2016; Gutman, Dautriche, Crabbé, & Christophe, 2015; Höhle, Weissenborn, Schmitz, & Ischebeck, 2001; Morgan & Demuth, 1996), which states that children can use prosodic boundary information to construct a rudimentary syntactic structure that could help bootstrap lexical and syntactic acquisition (e.g. Christophe et al., 2016, 2008; Christophe, Gout, Peperkamp, & Morgan, 2003; de Carvalho, 2017; de Carvalho et al., 2018; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Morgan & Demuth, 1996).
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Although it was necessary to choose an order of authorship for publication, this work has been a true collaboration, and each author’s contribution to the project has been equally important.