English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing | Zendy

Alex de Carvalho | Zendy; Jeffrey Lidz | Zendy; Lyn Tieu | Zendy; Tonia Bleam | Zendy; Anne Christophe | Zendy

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English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing

Author(s) -

Alex de Carvalho,

Jeffrey Lidz,

Lyn Tieu,

Tonia Bleam,

Anne Christophe

Publication year - 2016

Publication title -

the journal of the acoustical society of america

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619

H-Index - 187

eISSN - 1520-8524

pISSN - 0001-4966

DOI - 10.1121/1.4954385

Subject(s) - prosody , homophone , linguistics , parsing , sentence , noun , computer science , mirroring , syntax , psychology , natural language processing , speech recognition , communication , philosophy

This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). The words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. In an oral completion task, 4- to 5-year-olds successfully exploited the sentence's prosodic structure to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, mirroring previous results in French (but challenging previous English-language results) and providing cross-linguistic evidence for the role of phrasal prosody in children's syntactic analysis.7 page(s

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