8-month-old infants' ability to process word order is shaped by the amount of exposure

Abstract

In the majority of languages, the functional distinction between functors and content words correlates with lower-level, perceptually observable properties. Functors are generally more frequent and prosodically more minimal than content words. Previous studies demonstrate that the frequency distribution and the different acoustic realization of frequent and infrequent words guide infants in discovering their native word order. However, whether and if yes, how the exact frequency ratio impacts infants' ability to recognize function and content words and their relative order has never been explored. Here we investigate this by testing whether with a small ratio between functors' and content words' frequency, 1:3 as opposed to the 1:9 ratio in previous studies, French 8-month-olds are able to establish the functor-initial word order typical of their native language (Experiment 1) and whether prosody (Experiment 2) and the amount of exposure (Experiment 3) modulate this ability. We observed that infants exhibited the predicted functor-initial preference only when they were exposed to a short familiarization phase, i.e. reduced exposure. This suggests that different amounts of information selectively trigger different processing mechanisms, and little exposure may favor the extraction of regularities.

Learning word order: early beginnings

“…consisted of a strict alternation of frequent (i.e., ge, fi) and infrequent elements (e.g., bi, ru, do …), mimicking functors and content words, respectively (panel A in left table ). Frequent tokens were ninefold more frequent than infrequent tokens [4][5][6]19,32] in all but one study [25] in which they were only threefold more frequent (A). Some artificial languages additionally included the prosodic patterns marking phrasal prominence in natural languages: alternating elements with higher versus lower pitch (224 versus 200 Hz) [5], as in functor-final (FF) languages (B), or alternating short and long elements (120 versus 144 ms) [5,19,25], as in functor-initial (FI) languages (C,D).…”

“…as invariable anchor points in a sufficiently variable familiarization stream [25]. Furthermore, by 13 months of age, infants' knowledge of the functor-directionality of their native language impacts on the learning strategies they rely on to parse new input.…”

Word Order in Turiturian of Batak Toba Language

“…The science studies about the characteristics of language and patterns across languages is called typology [1][2][3][4]. Generally, language typology distinguishes two types of language [5]. Typology also explains a group of objects based on the similarity of basic properties.…”