0000000000139975
AUTHOR
Anne Christophe
Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds
In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a dete…
Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition
International audience; no abstract
Perception du langage chez le nourrisson : apprendre les mots
International audience
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary. We compare these results with similar results obtained with English-speaking infants, and discuss their implication fo…
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-down known word recognition cues. Given that most of these cues are specific to the language infants are acquiring, we emphasize how the development of these abilities varies cross-linguistically, and explore their developmental origin. In particular, …
Initialiser l'acquisition précoce du langage
International audience