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

Abstract

A central problem in language acquisition is how children effortlessly acquire the grammar of their native language even though speech provides no direct information about underlying structure. This learning problem is even more challenging for dual language learners, yet bilingual infants master their mother tongues as efficiently as monolinguals do. Here we ask how bilingual infants succeed, investigating the particularly challenging task of learning two languages with conflicting word orders (English: eat an apple versus Japanese: ringo-wo taberu 'apple.acc eat'). We show that 7-month-old bilinguals use the characteristic prosodic cues (pitch and duration) associated with different word orders to solve this problem. Thus, the complexity of bilingual acquisition is countered by bilinguals' ability to exploit relevant cues. Moreover, the finding that perceptually available cues like prosody can bootstrap grammatical structure adds to our understanding of how and why infants acquire grammar so early and effortlessly.

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

“…Newborns can discriminate categories of function words and content words on the basis of their different prosodic characteristics (Shi et al, 1999). Children show sensitivity to the word order of their native language as young as 7-8 months of age on the basis of word frequency and prosody (Höhle and Weissenborn, 2003;Gervain and Werker, 2013). Once children's knowledge of lexicosyntactic information becomes more detailed, they can access lexical and syntactic structures independently from the prosodic information available.…”

Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…The setting in this type of experiment shows that babies discriminate between rhythmic classes because by lowpass filtering (e.g., under 400 Hz) the speech signal, it gets a dramatic degradation of its phonemic content (i.e., the vast majority of its formant structure is removed), while it retains its rhythmic structure. Other studies employing this type of low-pass filtered stimuli (like Byers-Heinlein et al, 2010) provide evidence that language discrimination in neonates which were surrounded by a bilingual environment prenatally is robust, and that that language preference reflects previous listening experience (see also Gervain and Werker, 2013;Molnar et al, 2014a,b). Besides, other types of studies show that at 4 1 /2 months babies tend to listen longer to speech samples that include prosodic pauses corresponding to syntactic units, as opposed to speech samples with pauses that break syntactic units (cf.…”

“…Gleitman and Wanner, 1982;Mehler et al, 1988, et seq. ;Gervain and Werker, 2013), which claim that prosodic cues are employed for syntactic parsing. The literature converges in the observation that a large amount of such prosodic cues (in particular, rhythmic cues) are already acquired before the completion of the globularization phase, which paves the way for the premises of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, allowing babies to have a rich knowledge of the prosody of their target language before they can start parsing the primary linguistic data syntactically.…”

“…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.…”

Developmental Trajectory of Audiovisual Speech Integration in Early Infancy. A Review of Studies Using the McGurk Paradigm

“…One good illustration of these phenomena is the aforementioned infant-directed speech. Research on referential nature of human eye-gaze, prosody or pointing provides evidence for the role of these social cues in language development: phonetic knowledge (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003), word learning (Gliga & Csibra, 2009;Houston-Price, Plunkett , & Duff y, 2006), syntax (Gervain & Werker, 2013). Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/10/18 2:38 AM Does the social-pragmatic account of language development help to explain the age-related changes in visual scanning of articulating faces?…”