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Language and Speech
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Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition

Anne Christophe

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS /CNRS/ DEC-ENS, Paris, Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Faculté de Médecine Paris Descartes, anne.christophe{at}ens.fr

Séverine Millotte

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS /CNRS/ DEC-ENS, Paris, Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale, Genève

Savita Bernal

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS /CNRS/ DEC-ENS, Paris

Jeffrey Lidz

Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, U.S.A.

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results that test the plausibility of this hypothesis. These results are tied together within a model of the architecture of the first stages of language processing, and their acquisition.

Key Words: function words • language acquisition • phrasal prosody

Language and Speech, Vol. 51, No. 1-2, 61-75 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/00238309080510010501
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