German‐learning infants’ ability to detect unstressed closed‐class elements in continuous speech

Höhle, Barbara; Weißenborn, Jürgen

doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00261

Cited by 134 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Because the function word the signals the beginning of a noun phrase, once the location of such a phrase is detected, it also helps to find the location of other elements within the same syntactic constituent ( Jusczyk, 2002). Further evidence for the connection between syntax and prosody comes, for instance, from a study with 7-to 9-month-old German infants who recognized the internal structure of a noun phrase (the + content word) in continuous speech (Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003). As for the importance of prosody in acquiring syntactic rules, Weinert (1992) showed that normal control children were able to learn the syntactic rules from prosodically enriched sentences, whereas children with developmental language impairment could not make use of the available prosodic information for the acquisition of syntactic rules.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory Language Comprehension in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Sabisch

Hahne

Glass

et al. 2006

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Abstract& In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to compare auditory sentence comprehension in 16 children with developmental dyslexia (age 9-12 years) and unimpaired controls matched on age, sex, and nonverbal intelligence. Passive sentences were presented, which were either correct or contained a syntactic violation (phrase structure) or a semantic violation (selectional restriction). In an overall sentence correctness judgment task, both control and dyslexic children performed well. In the ERPs, control children and dyslexic children demonstrated a similar N400 component for the semantic violation. For the syntactic violation, control children demonstrated a combined pattern, consisting of an early starting bilaterally distributed anterior negativity and a late centro-parietal positivity (P600). Dyslexic children showed a different pattern that is characterized by a delayed left lateralized anterior negativity, followed by a P600. These data indicate that dyslexic children do not differ from unimpaired controls with respect to semantic integration processes (N400) or controlled processes of syntactic reanalyses (P600) during auditory sentence comprehension. However, early and presumably highly automatic processes of phrase structure building reflected in the anterior negativity are delayed in dyslexic children. Moreover, the differences in hemispheric distribution of the syntactic negativity indicate different underlying processes in dyslexic children and controls. The bilateral distribution in controls suggests an involvement of right hemispherically established prosodic processes in addition to the left hemispherically localized syntactic processes, supporting the view that prosodic information may be used to facilitate syntactic processing during normal comprehension. The left hemispheric distribution observed for dyslexic children, in contrast, suggests that these children do not rely on information about the prosodic contour during auditory sentence comprehension as much as controls do. This finding points toward a phonological impairment in dyslexic children that might hamper the development of syntactic processes. &

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory Language Comprehension in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Sabisch

Hahne

Glass

et al. 2006

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…Shi, Werker, and Morgan (1999) found that newborns can discriminate isolated lexical words from grammatical words based on acoustic characteristics. An early awareness of the phonological characteristics of grammatical words may provide a foundation for the increasingly differentiated forms of distributional learning that begin to emerge later in the first year (e.g., Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003;Höhle, Weissenborn, Kiefer, Schulz & Schmitz, 2004). By 11 months, infants are attentive to prosodic and segmental features of functor words in fluent speech (Shady, 1996;Shafer, Shucard, Shucard, & Gerken, 1998), and by 18 months, they distinguish passages in which familiar functors are grammatically or ungrammatically positioned (Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998).…”

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Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

Zangl

Fernald

2007

Language Learning and Development

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Two experiments using online speech processing measures with 18-to 36-month-olds extended research by Gerken & McIntosh (1993) showing that young children's comprehension is disrupted when the grammatical determiner in a noun phrase is replaced with a nonce determiner (the car vs. po car). In Expt. 1, 18-month-olds were slower and less accurate to identify familiar nouns on nonce-article than grammatical-article trials, although older children who produced determiners in their own speech showed no disruption. However, when tested on novel words in Expt. 2, even linguistically advanced 34-month-olds had greater difficulty identifying familiar as well as newly learned object names preceded by a nonce article. Children's success in "listening through" an uninformative functor-like nonce syllable before a familiar noun was related to their level of grammatical competence, but their attention to the nonce article also varied with lexical familiarity and the overall redundancy of the processing context.

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“…During the second half of their first year of life, infants can isolate elements in the speech stream that correspond to lexical items, as well as bound morphemes (e.g., Blenn, Seidl, & Höhle, 2003;Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003;Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995;Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999). At the same time, they are able to track co-occurrence patterns between adjacent elements on the basis of distributional analyses, including order relations (Gomez & Gerken, 1999;Jusczyk, Houston, et al, 1999;Mandel, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 1996;Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, & Vishton, 1999;Saffran, 2001;Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996;Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, & Newport, 1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Recognition of Discontinuous Verbal Dependencies by German 19-Month-Olds: Evidence for Lexical and Structural Influences on Children's Early Processing Capacities

Höhle¹,

Schmitz²,

Santelmann³

et al. 2006

Language Learning and Development

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The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds: Evidence for lexical and structural infl uences on children's early processing capacities U n i v e r s i t ä t P o t s d a m Jürgen Weissenborn Humboldt University BerlinRecent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002;Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child's capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children's recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.

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German‐learning infants’ ability to detect unstressed closed‐class elements in continuous speech

Cited by 134 publications

References 25 publications

Auditory Language Comprehension in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Auditory Language Comprehension in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

The Recognition of Discontinuous Verbal Dependencies by German 19-Month-Olds: Evidence for Lexical and Structural Influences on Children's Early Processing Capacities

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