Development of Liaison Representation and its Top-Down Influence on Word Processing in Infants

Babineau, Mireille; Shi, Rushen

doi:10.1080/15475441.2016.1170604

Cited by 4 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Children must, therefore, undo liaison by removing the /l/ or /z/ in order to retrieve the verbal item. There is empirical evidence demonstrating that French-learning children can undo liaison by 20 to 24 months of age (Babineau & Shi, 2016). One possibility, then, is that this process in French serves to bring attention to the morphological status of the marker during early acquisition, as evidenced by Frenchlearning children's tendency to undo liaison in the course of comprehending utterances containing novel phrases more often when the liaison consonant was one typically associated with the wordfinal position (e.g., /z/) than with less reliably position-bound consonants (e.g., /t/; cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Gonzalez‐Gomez

Hsin

Barrière

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb (SV) agreement, whereas recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the current study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of SV agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City between about 3 and 5years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb+pseudonoun object (e.g., agarra el micho 'he throws the micho' vs. agarran el duco 'they throw the duco'); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto 'object' replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). Hence, these findings underscore the importance of task-specific/stimulus-specific features when testing early morphosyntactic development and suggest that previous results may have underestimated Spanish-speaking children's competence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Gonzalez‐Gomez

Hsin

Barrière

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…Although infants are able to parse consonant-initial words early on, studies on the segmentation of vowel-initial words have consistently shown that these forms are harder to segment (Babineau & Shi, 2014, 2016; Kim & Sundara, 2015; Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001; Nazzi et al, 2005; Seidl & Johnson, 2008). In particular, the ability to extract vowel-initial words from resyllabification contexts takes time to develop, as shown by Mattys and Jusczyk (2001).…”

Section: Variations Ambiguities and The Case Of French Liaisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, a toddler could say les navions instead of les /z/ avions [the planes], possibly due to mis-encoding the form navion from instances such as un /n/ avion [œ̃.navjɔ̃]. It is only after lengthy experience with liaison contexts that French-learning toddlers can gradually learn to counter the onset bias, that is, to ignore the intruding liaison consonant that surfaces at the onset of a vowel-initial word (Babineau & Shi, 2014, 2016). For instance, after hearing a novel vowel-initial word in different contexts yielding variable liaison-consonant onsets (e.g., ces /z/ onches , un /n/ onche , petit /t/ onche , premier /r/ onche ), French-learning 20-month-olds were not able to use the disambiguating subsyllabic distributional cues (i.e., variable liaisons), and they misinterpreted the target as being consonant initial (e.g., zonche ; Babineau & Shi, 2014).…”

Section: Variations Ambiguities and The Case Of French Liaisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The exposure to variable preceding liaison-triggering words (i.e., variable liaison consonants) facilitated the 24-month-olds’ parsing of such novel vowel-initial words. Subsequent work revealed that a few months later (i.e., 30 months), children have a well-developed ability to parse new vowel-initial words from liaison cases (Babineau & Shi, 2016). Around this age, children’s speech begins to show more correct liaisons in various contexts (Buerkin-Pontrelli et al, 2017), and they start using liaison as a cue to subject–verb agreement (e.g., Legendre et al, 2010).…”

Section: Variations Ambiguities and The Case Of French Liaisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…” [“elephant, come here!”]; 40.6% of all productions were vowel initial in the study by Chevrot et al [2009]). 2 They can also segment new vowel-initial words based on subsyllabic statistical cues around the age of 24 months (Babineau & Shi, 2014, 2016). Hence, although 30-month-olds rarely hear the vowel-initial forms of vowel-initial nouns, we hypothesized that this form might already be accessible during word recognition.…”

Section: Variations Ambiguities and The Case Of French Liaisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Variable forms in French-learning toddlers’ lexical representations.

Babineau¹,

Legrand²,

Shi³

2021

Developmental Psychology

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We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on children's early lexical representations of this frequent intrusion by consonants by testing whether toddlers store multiple forms for vowel-initial words (e.g., téléphant, zéléphant) early in acquisition. Thirty-one Quebec French-learning 30-month-olds completed an eyetracking experiment (16 girls). Children were predominantly from White, middle-class families living in a large urban area (Montreal). Each trial presented two objects while one of them was named. There were four key trial types: (a) correct vowel-initial (e.g., joli éléphant [pretty elephant]); (b) pragmatically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli zéléphant, /z/ intrusion [pretty elephants], which is grammatically acceptable but does not correspond to the picture); (c) lexically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli téléphant, /t/ intrusion, as /t/ is a frequent liaison consonant in general but is impossible with joli); (d) lexically incorrect infrequent intrusion (e.g., joli géléphant, /g/ intrusion, as /g/ is an infrequent liaison consonant and is also impossible with joli). The results showed that target recognition was successful in the frequent /t/-and /z/-intrusion trials and was also evident in the vowel-initial trials, whereas it was impeded in the infrequent /g/-intrusion trials. Our findings demonstrate that French-learning children's early lexicon contains multiple variants for words that are subject to phonological alternations, including frequent liaison-consonant variants.

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When language‐general and language‐specific processes are in conflict: The case of sub‐syllabic word segmentation in toddlers

Babineau

Emond

Shi

2022

Infancy

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Infants use statistics‐based word segmentation strategies from the preverbal stage. Statistical segmentation is, however, constrained by the Onset Bias, a language‐universal principle that disfavors segmentation that harms syllable integrity. Children eventually learn language‐specific exceptions to this principle. For instance, sub‐syllabic parsing occurs for vowel‐initial words in French liaison contexts, that is, when a word's final consonant surfaces as the following word's syllabic onset (e.g., /n/ in un /n/éléphant). In past research, French‐learning 24‐month‐olds succeeded in parsing a vowel‐initial pseudo‐word surfacing with variable liaison consonants. This study further investigated infants' liaison representation, its potential impacts on parsing, and its interaction with the Onset Bias. In Experiments 1 and 2, French‐learning 24‐month‐olds were familiarized with pseudo‐words with variable liaison‐like versus nonliaison‐like onset consonants, preceded by words that cannot trigger those onsets (e.g., un zonche; un gonche). We found no mis‐segmentation as vowel‐initial and successful segmentation as consonant‐initial. In Experiment 3, when the preceding words could trigger a liaison consonant that matched the onset of the following word (e.g., un nonche), infants showed a vowel‐initial mis‐interpretation, against the Onset Bias, revealing an effect of liaison knowledge. These results demonstrate that toddlers balance their use of language‐general principles/strategies and language‐specific knowledge during early acquisition.

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Development of Liaison Representation and its Top-Down Influence on Word Processing in Infants

Cited by 4 publications

References 44 publications

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Variable forms in French-learning toddlers’ lexical representations.

When language‐general and language‐specific processes are in conflict: The case of sub‐syllabic word segmentation in toddlers

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