title: English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives, École normale supérieure - PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France x.de.carvalho@gmail.com, lyn.tieu@gmail.com, anne.christophe@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: de Carvalho
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA jlidz@umd.edu, tbleam@umd.edu.
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lidz
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives, École normale supérieure - PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France x.de.carvalho@gmail.com, lyn.tieu@gmail.com, anne.christophe@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Lyn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Tieu
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA jlidz@umd.edu, tbleam@umd.edu.
authors.forename: Tonia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bleam
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives, École normale supérieure - PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France x.de.carvalho@gmail.com, lyn.tieu@gmail.com, anne.christophe@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Christophe
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000367:Age Factors; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception