The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants.

This study examines the role of functional morphemes in the earliest stage of lexical development. Recent research showed that prelinguistic infants can perceive functional morphemes. We inquire whether infants use frequent functors to segment potential word forms. French-learning 8-month-olds were familiarized to two utterance types: a novel noun following a functor, and another novel noun following a prosodically matched nonsense functor. After familiarization, infants' segmentation of the two nouns was assessed in a test phase presenting the nouns in isolation. Infants in Experiment 1 showed evidence of using both frequent functors des and mes (as opposed to the nonsense functor kes) to segment the nouns, suggesting also that they had specific representations of the functors. The infrequent functor vos in Experiment 2 did not facilitate segmentation. Frequency is thus a crucial factor. Our findings demonstrate that frequent functors can bootstrap infants into early lexical learning. Furthermore, the effect of functors for initial word segmentation is likely universal.

[1]  Marieke van Heugten,et al.  French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition. , 2009, Developmental science.

[2]  Jeffrey Lidz,et al.  Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition , 2008, Language and speech.

[3]  Pierre A. Hallé,et al.  Do 11-month-old French Infants Process Articles? , 2008, Language and speech.

[4]  Jeffrey Lidz,et al.  Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning , 2007 .

[5]  Anne Fernald,et al.  Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech , 2007, Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development.

[6]  Julia L. Evans,et al.  Can Infants Map Meaning to Newly Segmented Words? , 2007, Psychological science.

[7]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Recognition and Representation of Function Words in English-Learning Infants , 2006 .

[8]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Frequency and form as determinants of functor sensitivity in English-acquiring infants. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  Anne Fernald,et al.  Names in frames: infants interpret words in sentence frames faster than words in isolation. , 2006, Developmental science.

[10]  Thierry Nazzi,et al.  Early segmentation of fluent speech by infants acquiring French: Emerging evidence for crosslinguistic differences , 2006 .

[11]  Barbara Lust,et al.  Getting there faster: 18- and 24-month-old infants' use of function words to determine reference. , 2006, Child development.

[12]  Toben H. Mintz.  Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech , 2003, Cognition.

[13]  Barbara Höhle,et al.  German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed class elements in continuous speech , 2003 .

[14]  K. Kiehl,et al.  Detection of Sounds in the Auditory Stream: Event-Related fMRI Evidence for Differential Activation to Speech and Nonspeech , 2001, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[15]  Elizabeth K. Johnson,et al.  Word Segmentation by 8-Month-Olds: When Speech Cues Count More Than Statistics , 2001 .

[16]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants , 2001, Cognition.

[17]  Cecile T. L. Kuijpers,et al.  Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds , 2000, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[18]  H. Gleitman,et al.  Human simulations of vocabulary learning , 1999, Cognition.

[19]  Mary R. Newsome,et al.  The Beginnings of Word Segmentation in English-Learning Infants , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[20]  J. Werker,et al.  Newborn infants’ sensitivity to perceptual cues to lexical and grammatical words , 1999, Cognition.

[21]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Phonotactic and Prosodic Effects on Word Segmentation in Infants , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[22]  L. Gerken,et al.  An electrophysiological study of infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of English speech. , 1998, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[23]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  Phonological and acoustic bases for earliest grammatical category assignment: a cross-linguistic perspective , 1998, Journal of Child Language.

[24]  Anne Christophe Teresa Guasti Marina Nespor.  Reflections on Phonological Bootstrapping: Its Role for Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition , 1997 .

[25]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[26]  J. Pine,et al.  Syntactic categories in the speech of young children: the case of the determiner , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[27]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants′ Detection of the Sound Patterns of Words in Fluent Speech , 1995, Cognitive Psychology.

[28]  D. Bassano,et al.  Early grammatical and prosodic marking of utterance modality in French: a longitudinal case study , 1994, Journal of Child Language.

[29]  LouAnn Gerken,et al.  Interplay of Function Morphemes and Prosody in Early Language , 1993 .

[30]  Barbara Landau,et al.  Function Morphemes in Young Children's Speech Perception and Production , 1990 .

[31]  Virginia Valian,et al.  Anchor points in language learning: The role of marker frequency ☆ , 1988 .

[32]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[33]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Why Nouns Are Learned before Verbs: Linguistic Relativity Versus Natural Partitioning. Technical Report No. 257. , 1982 .

[34]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[35]  Rushen Shi,et al.  Segmentation and Representation of Function Words in Preverbal French-Learning Infants , 2006 .

[36]  Rushen Shi,et al.  EARLY SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES IN INFANTS' LANGUAGE , 2005 .

[37]  Elizabeth K. Johnson.  Grammatical gender and early word recognition in Dutch , 2005 .

[38]  P. Hagoort,et al.  Word segmentation from continuous speech: An ERP study with 10-month-old infants , 2004 .

[39]  L. Polka,et al.  Word segmentation in monolingual and bilingual infant learners of English and French , 2003 .

[40]  Dani Byrd,et al.  CMB 1 Coarticulatory Cues Enhance Infants ’ Recognition of Syllable Sequences in Speech , 2000 .

[41]  Barbara Höhle,et al.  The origins of syntactic knowledge : recognition of determiners in one old German children , 2000 .

[42]  Joost Van de Weijer,et al.  Language input for word discovery , 1999 .

[43]  Emmanuel Dupoux,et al.  Reflexions on prosodic bootstrapping: its role for lexical and syntactic acquisition , 1997 .

[44]  Rushen Shi,et al.  Perceptual correlates of content words and function words in early language input , 1995 .

[45]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Variability in early communicative development. , 1994, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[46]  P. Martel,et al.  Dictionnaire de fréquence des mots du français parlé au Québec : fréquence, dispersion, usage, écart réduit , 1992 .

[47]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .