Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 163, June 2017, Pages 67-79
Cognition

Original Articles
Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Toddlers use phrasal prosody to constrain syntactic analysis.

  • From 20 months on, they disambiguate noun/verb homophones.

  • They rapidly integrate phrasal prosody during sentence processing.

  • This suggests that phrasal prosody cues syntactic structure for young children.

  • An early access to syntactic structure may facilitate the learning of word meanings.

Abstract

This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers’ syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébé souris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourit à sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.

Introduction

Learning word meanings can be a very complex task for toddlers during language acquisition. In their daily life, toddlers need to extract word forms from the speech stream and associate them with possible meanings in their environment. But what kind of information can children use when they need to identify the meaning of a novel word? The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman, 1990, Landau and Gleitman, 1985; see also Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, & Gleitman, 1994; Fisher, 1996) proposes that having access to the syntactic structure of sentences can help children to discover the meaning of novel words. According to this hypothesis, syntax can serve as a “zoom lens” to help learners figure out which part of the world is being talked about, and hence to identify candidate meanings for novel words. In other words, the range of syntactic environments in which a given word occurs can be informative about its meaning (see Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999).

In the simplest case to illustrate this idea, it has been shown that around the age of two, children are able to learn that a novel word such as “larp” refers to an action, when listening to sentences in which it appears as a verb, as in “He is larping that”; but when exposed to sentences like “This is a larp” in which “larp” appears in a noun position, they learn that “larp” refers to an object (e.g., Bernal et al., 2007, Waxman et al., 2009). This suggests that children exploit the syntactic frames in which novel words occur to infer their possible referent. Going further, it has been shown that toddlers can also learn that a novel verb such as “blicking” refers to a causal action between two participants when listening to transitive sentences such as “She is blicking the baby”, but they do not make the same inference when listening to intransitive sentences such as “She is blicking” (Yuan and Fisher, 2009, Yuan et al., 2012). In Ferguson, Graf, and Waxman (2014), 19-month-olds exposed to sentences like “The dax is crying” were able to infer that “dax” referred to an animate entity (i.e., a novel animal), because it appeared in the subject position of a verb that requires an animate agent; but when exposed to sentences like “The dax is right here”, they did not show any preference for the animate entity at test. Taken together, these studies show the important role played by syntactic structure to assist language acquisition: at an age when toddlers do not have an extensive vocabulary yet, the syntactic structure of sentences helps them to discover the meaning of novel words. The question that arises is how toddlers manage to access the syntactic structure of sentences before acquiring an extensive vocabulary.

A potential cue that has triggered a great deal of interest is phrasal prosody: the rhythm and melody of speech. Across the world’s languages, the prosodic organization of speech is such that every prosodic phrase boundary is always aligned with a syntactic constituent boundary (Nespor and Vogel, 1986, Shattuck-Hufnagel and Turk, 1996), although the reverse is not true, since many syntactic boundaries are not marked prosodically. Crucially, however, prosodic information such as phrase-final lengthening, pitch contour variations and pauses between prosodic units may allow young listeners to find the boundaries between some of the syntactic constituents of a sentence, even in the absence of a very extensive vocabulary (Christophe et al., 2008, Morgan and Demuth, 1996, Morgan, 1986). This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to identify syntactic constituent boundaries, in addition to the perception of function words (Hallé et al., 2008, Höhle et al., 2004, Höhle and Weissenborn, 2003, Shafer et al., 1998 Shi et al., 2006, Shi and Melançon, 2010), has been proposed to be potentially important for infants to bootstrap their way into syntactic acquisition, because phrasal prosody would allow them to identify some of the syntactic constituents in a sentence, while function words would allow them to determine the syntactic nature of these constituents (Christophe et al., 2008, Shi, 2014).

Supporting this hypothesis, several studies have shown that the perception of prosodic boundaries can indeed help adults and preschoolers to constrain their syntactic analysis and resolve syntactic ambiguities (in English: de Carvalho et al., 2016b, Kjelgaard and Speer, 1999, Snedeker and Yuan, 2008 and in French: de Carvalho et al., 2016a, Millotte et al., 2008, Millotte et al., 2007). However, little is known about young children who are still in the process of acquiring the words of their language: can they exploit the prosodic structure of sentences as a cue to access their syntactic structure? Such an ability would be extremely important during the first steps of syntactic acquisition, since accessing the syntactic structure of sentences may allow children to determine the syntactic category of unknown words and therefore constrain their meaning.

A long series of studies shows that infants develop an impressive expertise with prosody from their first days of life. Newborns are able to exploit rhythmic information to discriminate between languages (Mehler et al., 1988, Nazzi et al., 1998); from 4.5 months onwards, infants are sensitive to the coherence of prosodic constituents (Gerken et al., 1994, Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987, Jusczyk et al., 1995, Männel and Friederici, 2009, Soderstrom et al., 2003), they show better recognition and memory for segments that correspond to whole prosodic units than for those which span prosodic boundaries (Mandel et al., 1994, Nazzi et al., 2006) and they can rely on prosodic cues to segment the speech stream into words and constrain their lexical access (Gout et al., 2004, Johnson, 2008, Millotte et al., 2010, Shukla et al., 2011). All of these findings, together with the reliable relationship between prosodic and syntactic structures, suggest that toddlers might be able to use phrasal prosody, not only to facilitate memory and lexical access, but also to constrain their syntactic analysis (see Christophe et al., 2008, Hawthorne and Gerken, 2014, Massicotte-Laforge and Shi, 2015, Morgan and Demuth, 1996, Morgan, 1986, Shi, 2014).

In the experiments that follow, we directly examined whether toddlers, who are still in the process of learning the syntax and the lexicon of their language, exploit phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

We tested toddlers’ ability to use phrasal prosody as a cue to access the syntactic structure of sentences and to constrain their interpretation of an ambiguous word. Pairs of French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous sentences. For instance, the word-form “/suʁi/” was used as a noun in: [Le bébéADJ sourisNOUN][a bien mangé] ‘The babyADJ mouseNOUN ate well’ (hereafter the noun prosody condition), and it was used as a verb in: [Le bébéNOUN][souritVERB à sa maman] ‘The baby

Experiment 2

To adapt the experimental design to 20-month-olds, several changes were implemented. The experiment was shortened by half by using only four of the previous eight pairs of noun-verb homophones. To avoid using the babble noise mask, only homophones for which the verb could be used in an intransitive structure were used (either intransitive verbs, or verbs that accepted omission of their complement). Finally, to give infants more time to process the sentences, each ambiguous sentence was repeated

General discussion

The results reported in this paper show that from 20 months on, toddlers are able to exploit phrasal prosody to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn allows them to identify the syntactic category of an ambiguous word and access its meaning. In a preferential looking task, both 28-month-olds (Experiment 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Experiment 2) were able to correctly assign a grammatical category to an ambiguous word (noun vs. verb) depending only on its position within the

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a PhD fellowship from the École normale supérieure to Alex de Carvalho, and by a an ESRC Future Research Leaders award (ES/N017404/1) to Isabelle Dautriche. It was also supported by grants from the Région IIe-de-France, Fondation de France, LabEx IEC (ANR-10-LABX-0087), IdEx PSL (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02), as well as the ANR ‘Apprentissages’ (ANR-13-APPR-0012). The authors thank Anne-Caroline Fiévet, Luce Legros and Mélanie Rouelle for their assistance with recruitment

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