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Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head‐direction parameter
Author(s) -
Christophe Anne,
Nespor Marina,
Teresa Guasti Maria,
Van Ooyen Brit
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-7687.00273
Subject(s) - head (geology) , psychology , turkish , word order , linguistics , cognitive psychology , natural language processing , computer science , geology , philosophy , geomorphology
We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6–12‐week‐old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and its prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish). This result supports the hypothesis that infants may use this kind of prosodic information to bootstrap their acquisition of word order.