Abstract
The input contains perceptually available cues, which might allow young infants to discover abstract properties of the target language. Thus, word frequency and prosodic prominence correlate systematically with basic word order in natural languages. Prelexical infants are sensitive to these frequency-based and prosodic cues, and use them to parse new input into phrases that follow the order characteristic of their native languages. Importantly, young infants readily integrate auditory and visual facial information while processing language. Here, we ask whether co-verbal visual information provided by talking faces also helps prelexical infants learn the word order of their native language in addition to word frequency and prosodic prominence. We created two structurally ambiguous artificial languages containing head nods produced by an animated avatar, aligned or misaligned with the frequency-based and prosodic information. During 4 minutes, two groups of 4- and 8-month-old infants were familiarized with the artificial language containing aligned auditory and visual cues, while two further groups were exposed to the misaligned language. Using a modified Headturn Preference Procedure, we tested infants’ preference for test items exhibiting the word order of the native language, French, vs. the opposite word order. At 4 months, infants had no preference, suggesting that 4-month-olds were not able to integrate the three available cues, or had not yet built a representation of word order. By contrast, 8-month-olds showed no preference when auditory and visual cues were aligned and a preference for the native word order when visual cues were misaligned. These results imply that infants at this age start to integrate the co-verbal visual and auditory cues.
Highlights
Discovering the word order of the native language is one of the challenges that infants face during acquisition
What cues allow infants to accomplish this major task? Here, we investigate whether prelexical infants can use co-verbal visual information provided by talking faces, combined with prosody, as a bootstrapping cue to basic word order
The present study investigated the abilities of prelexical infants to integrate frequency-based, prosodic and co-verbal visual information to parse speech
Summary
Discovering the word order of the native language is one of the challenges that infants face during acquisition. Infants tend to follow the word order rules of the target language from their first multiword utterances [1], which suggests that infants configure the basic word order. Crsng.gc.ca/index_eng.asp) to J.F.W., as well as the French Investissements d’Avenir - Labex EFL program Enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/cid55551/ investissements-d-avenir-projets-laboratoires-dexcellence-par-region-et-domaine.html), ANR grant (ANR-15-CE37-0009-01; http://www.agencenationale-recherche.fr/en/), and ERC Consolidator Grant (773202 ERC-2017-COG ‘BabyRhythm’; https://erc.europa.eu/funding/consolidator-grants) to J.G. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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