Infants' sensitivity to non-adjacent dependencies across phonological phrase boundaries.
Natural languages contain numerous non-adjacent relationships between words or morphemes in a sentence, often straddling phonological phrase boundaries (e.g., [these sheep] [have [ellipsis (horizontal)]]). Since phonological phrases are considered the main processing unit for infants, this may cause the acquisition of cross-phrase dependencies to be challenging. This study, however, shows that by 17 months of age, French-learning infants have nonetheless gained sensitivity to remote determiner-auxiliary co-occurrences that are interceded by phonological phrase boundaries. Infants thus possess a robust mechanism for tracking non-adjacent dependencies. This ability is essential for early grammatical development.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. marieke.vanheugten@utoronto.ca
Marieke
M
van Heugten
Rushen
R
Shi
D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary