6533b860fe1ef96bd12c3aeb
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
Michel DutatSéverine MillotteJames L. MorganSavita BernalSylvie MargulesAnne Christophesubject
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammarP101-410Linguistics and LanguagePhraseHead (linguistics)First languageText segmentationLexical accessLanguage and LinguisticsLinguisticsArticleProsodyPsychologyWord (computer architecture)description
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 for lexical and syntactic acquisition.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-06-30 |