Prosodic Cues to Word Order: What Level of Representation?

Abstract

Within language, systematic correlations exist between syntactic structure and prosody. Prosodic prominence, for instance, falls on the complement and not the head of syntactic phrases, and its realization depends on the phrasal position of the prominent element. Thus, in Japanese, a functor-final language, prominence is phrase-initial, and realized as increased pitch (^ Tōkyō ni “Tokyo to”), whereas in French, English, or Italian, functor-initial languages, it manifests itself as phrase-final lengthening (to Rome). Prosody is readily available in the linguistic signal even to the youngest infants. It has, therefore, been proposed that young learners might be able to exploit its correlations with syntax to bootstrap language structure. In this study, we tested this hypothesis, investigating how 8-month-old monolingual French infants processed an artificial grammar manipulating the relative position of prosodic prominence and word frequency. In Condition 1, we created a speech stream in which the two cues, prosody and frequency, were aligned, frequent words being prosodically non-prominent and infrequent ones being prominent, as is the case in natural language (functors are prosodically minimal compared to content words). In Condition 2, the two cues were misaligned, with frequent words carrying prosodic prominence, unlike in natural language. After familiarization with the aligned or the misaligned stream in a headturn preference procedure, we tested infants’ preference for test items having a frequent word initial or a frequent word final word order. We found that infants’ familiarized with the aligned stream showed the expected preference for the frequent word initial test items, mimicking the functor-initial word order of French. Infants in the misaligned condition showed no preference. These results suggest that infants are able to use word frequency and prosody as early cues to word order and they integrate them into a coherent representation.

Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants

“…The familiar VO prosody condition was not tested. Recent work with monolingual French infants 19 , a language with word order and phrasal prosody similar to English 14 , has already revealed that monolingual infants can use trochaic prosody to guide word order preferences. Also, a VO condition would not allow us to tease apart the effects of familiarity and a universal iambic-trochaic bias.…”

The role of prosody in infants' early syntactic analysis and grammatical categorization

“…The data of another 12 infants were excluded due to looking time too short (1), fussiness (9), and ceiling looking (2).…”

“…8 Furthermore, infants' prosody-based phrasal grouping is in line with the head direction of their native language. For example, French-learning 8-month-olds prefer groupings with weakinitial and strong-final syllables, 9 the typical prosody found in a head-initial language.…”

Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…Let us focus on the two main ideas that we have seen so far, which are that (i) according to the "globularization hypothesis" of Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco (2014a,b), the postnatal globularization of the brain is an essential ingredient for the development of our syntactic capacities, and that (ii) according to the "prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis" of Mehler et al (1988), Christophe et al (2003), Bernard and Gervain (2012), Gervain and Werker (2013), Langus and Nespor (2013) and others, children use prosody in order to infer the syntactic pattern of the language they are acquiring.…”

“…i.a. Mehler et al, 1988;Christophe et al, 2003;Bernard and Gervain, 2012;Gervain and Werker, 2013;Langus and Nespor, 2013) 6 . In particular, a number of authors have proposed that the relative order between heads and their complements strongly correlates with the rhythmic type of the language.…”