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Article Dans Une Revue Developmental Science Année : 2016

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Résumé

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tr es jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenêtre] 'the little girl closes the window'-brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings. Research highlights • In two experiments, 3.5-to 5-year-old children used phrasal prosody to disambiguate locally ambiguous sentences using noun/verb homophones. • The effect of prosody was observed from the ambiguous word onset, indicating that children integrate prosody online.
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hal-02951246 , version 1 (14-10-2022)

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Alex de Carvalho, Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe. Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis. Developmental Science, 2016, 19 (2), pp.235-250. ⟨10.1111/desc.12300⟩. ⟨hal-02951246⟩
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