PMID- 8194302
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 19940627
LR  - 20191023
IS  - 0010-0277 (Print)
IS  - 0010-0277 (Linking)
VI  - 51
IP  - 3
DP  - 1994 Mar
TI  - When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to 
      phonological versus syntactic phrases.
PG  - 237-65
AB  - According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language 
      learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes 
      (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental 
      frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. 
      However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly 
      reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units 
      such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the 
      prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with 
      sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase 
      (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical 
      NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. 
      The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure 
      does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, 
      infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing 
      pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in 
      the pronoun NP condition, infants showed no difference in listening times for the 
      two pause locations. To determine if other sentence types containing pronoun 
      subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of 
      these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun 
      subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the 
      subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject 
      and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the 
      prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign 
      a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential 
      processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to 
      arrive at the correct syntactic representation.
FAU - Gerken, L
AU  - Gerken L
AD  - Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo 14260.
FAU - Jusczyk, P W
AU  - Jusczyk PW
FAU - Mandel, D R
AU  - Mandel DR
LA  - eng
GR  - HD-15795/HD/NICHD NIH HHS/United States
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
PT  - Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.
PL  - Netherlands
TA  - Cognition
JT  - Cognition
JID - 0367541
MH  - Arousal
MH  - *Attention
MH  - Female
MH  - Humans
MH  - Infant
MH  - *Language Development
MH  - Male
MH  - *Phonetics
MH  - Pitch Perception
MH  - Psycholinguistics
MH  - *Semantics
MH  - Speech Acoustics
MH  - *Speech Perception
EDAT- 1994/03/01 00:00
MHDA- 1994/03/01 00:01
CRDT- 1994/03/01 00:00
PHST- 1994/03/01 00:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 1994/03/01 00:01 [medline]
PHST- 1994/03/01 00:00 [entrez]
AID - 0010-0277(94)90055-8 [pii]
AID - 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90055-8 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Cognition. 1994 Mar;51(3):237-65. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90055-8.