Abstract
Within language, systematic correlations exist between syntactic structure and prosody. Prosodic prominence, for instance, falls on the complement and not the head of syntactic phrases, and its realization depends on the phrasal position of the prominent element. Thus, in Japanese, a functor-final language, prominence is phrase-initial, and realized as increased pitch (^ Tōkyō ni “Tokyo to”), whereas in French, English, or Italian, functor-initial languages, it manifests itself as phrase-final lengthening (to Rome). Prosody is readily available in the linguistic signal even to the youngest infants. It has, therefore, been proposed that young learners might be able to exploit its correlations with syntax to bootstrap language structure. In this study, we tested this hypothesis, investigating how 8-month-old monolingual French infants processed an artificial grammar manipulating the relative position of prosodic prominence and word frequency. In Condition 1, we created a speech stream in which the two cues, prosody and frequency, were aligned, frequent words being prosodically non-prominent and infrequent ones being prominent, as is the case in natural language (functors are prosodically minimal compared to content words). In Condition 2, the two cues were misaligned, with frequent words carrying prosodic prominence, unlike in natural language. After familiarization with the aligned or the misaligned stream in a headturn preference procedure, we tested infants’ preference for test items having a frequent word initial or a frequent word final word order. We found that infants’ familiarized with the aligned stream showed the expected preference for the frequent word initial test items, mimicking the functor-initial word order of French. Infants in the misaligned condition showed no preference. These results suggest that infants are able to use word frequency and prosody as early cues to word order and they integrate them into a coherent representation.
Highlights
The languages of the world show considerable variation in word order
The English- and Spanish-exposed infants were, as both languages are VO with phrasal prosodies that are sufficiently similar to that French
In an artificial grammar learning task, we found that they showed the predicted preference for frequent word initial test items, mimicking the functor-initial word order of French, when the two cues were aligned at the level of lexical items, i.e., frequency words were non-prominent, but not when they were misaligned
Summary
The languages of the world show considerable variation in word order. In Japanese, for instance, the object precedes the verb [ringo-wo taberu (apple.acc eat) “eat an apple”] and postpositions follow their nouns [Tokyo kara (Tokyo from) “from Tokyo”] etc. In French, by contrast, the object follows the verb [manger une pomme (eat.inf an apple) “eat an apple”] and prepositions precede their nouns [de Paris (from Paris) “from Paris”]. This variation is not random: most languages conform to a basic word order type, which is usually characterized by the relative order of the object and the verb or by the typical position of function words within phrases (Greenberg, 1978; Dryer, 1992). The order of words in several phrase types correlates with that of the object and the verb.
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