Do 11-month-old French Infants Process Articles?

Abstract

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, des. The six articles were compared with pseudo articles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments support the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words.

Contributions of infant word learning to language development

“…. ), and furthermore only distinguish article-noun lists containing familiar and unfamiliar nouns when the preceding articles are real ones (Hallé et al 2008). Similarly, phrases comprising a real English functor (the, her, its .…”

Gleaning Structure from Sound: The Role of Prosodic Contrast in Learning Non-adjacent Dependencies

“…Data from L1 acquisition suggests that this also makes them harder to track in spoken input: infants prefer listening to lexical over functional items in their native language (Shi and Werker 2001, 2003), and have difficulties with the phonological encoding of function words (Hallé et al. 2008; Shi et al. 2006a, b; Shi and Lepage 2008), especially the less acoustically salient ones (Strömqvist et al.…”

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

“…Unlike the third person pronoun ils ("they") and il ("he"), which share the same form in isolation (i.e., both [il]), determiners linked to plural (e.g., ces [se] "these", les [le] "the", mes [me] "my pl ") are phonologically different from determiners linked to singular (e.g., ce [cə] "this", le [lə] "the", mon [mɔ] "my sg "). Given that infants already segment and store frequent determiners (e.g., Hallé, Durand, & De Boysson-Bardies, 2008;Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003;Shi, Cutler, Werker, & Cruickshank, 2006;Shi & Lepage, 2008;Shi, Marquis, & Gauthier, 2006; and even inflectional suffixes (Marquis & Shi, 2012;Mintz, 2013) before one year of age, we may expect that by 30 months of age they can perceive the link between specific determiners (e.g., ces) and the /z/ liaison consonant, and that this knowledge may in turn bias their liaison interpretation, i.e., a vowel-initial bias, as shown in adults.…”