Abstract
The present study examines the initial parsing of noun phrases in infants. Participants were 8-month-old Quebec-French-learning infants. During Familiarization, infants heard two types of trials, one presenting a noun phrase sliced from a sentence (NP trial) and the other presenting the same word sequence (as in the NP trial) but sliced from another sentence in which these words were a part of a noun phrase and a part of a verb phrase, i.e., a non-unit trial. During Test, infants heard the original sentence containing the sliced NP and that containing the sliced non-unit. Two pairs of noun phrases and non-units were used in the experiment across two groups of infants. We predicted that if infants encoded the sliced stimuli in the NP trial as more coherent than those in the non-unit trial during Familiarization, they should listen longer to the sentences containing the NPs than those containing the same words but constituting non-units. Preliminary results show that infants listened significantly longer to the sentences containing the sliced noun phrases, even though the NP trial and non-unit trial during Familiarization involved exactly the same words. This finding suggests that salient prosodic markings enable French-learning infants to parse noun phrases from sentences.
Published Version
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