English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing

Alex de Carvalho (1, 2, 3) , Jeffrey Lidz (4) , Lyn Tieu (1, 2, 3) , Tonia Bleam (4) , Anne Christophe (1, 2, 3)

1 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique
2 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris
3 PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
4 Department of Linguistics - University of Maryland

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 pro-sodic 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 sen-tence'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.

Domaines: Psychologie; Sciences cognitives; Linguistique

Alex de Carvalho, Jeffrey Lidz, Lyn Tieu, Tonia Bleam, Anne Christophe. English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016, ⟨10.1121/1.4954385]⟩. ⟨hal-02951351⟩