title: The role of prosody in infants' early syntactic analysis and grammatical categorization.
abstract: This study tested the hypothesis that phrasal prosody assists early syntactic acquisition. Stimulus-sentences consisting of French determiners and pseudo-lexical-words were ambiguous between two syntactic structures, e.g., [[TonDet felliAdj craleN]NP [vurV laDet gosineN]VP] versus [[TonDet felliN]NP [craleV vurPrep laDet gosineN]VP], which had distinct prosodic cues. French-learning 20-month-olds were familiarized with the sentences either in the prosody of one structure, or the other structure. All infants were tested with Det + N (e.g., LeDet craleN) versus Pron + V (e.g., TuPron cralesV) trials containing non-familiarized functors. Infants perceived the test-stimuli according to the familiarized structure. They used prosody to categorize words and interpret adjacent and non-adjacent syntactic dependencies.
authors.affiliation: Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3P8, Canadamassicotte-laforge.sarah@courrier.uqam.ca, shi.rushen@uqam.ca.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Massicotte-Laforge
authors.affiliation: Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3P8, Canadamassicotte-laforge.sarah@courrier.uqam.ca, shi.rushen@uqam.ca.
authors.forename: Rushen
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Shi
mesh_terms: D001296:Audiovisual Aids; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010699:Phonation; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D014705:Verbal Behavior