Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing: The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements
By Barbara Hohle, J. Weissenborn, Drew Kiefer, A. Schulz. 2004
193 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe02039033ba17e57bd05bde3a7754d415226a12
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- The Recognition of Discontinuous Verbal Dependencies by German 19-Month-Olds: Evidence for Lexical and Structural Influences on Children's Early Processing Capacities (2006, result): “The evidence from Experiment 3 and the findings in Höhle et al. (2004) that indicate that the infants analyze the sequence determiner + noun as a structural unit pose a further interesting question.”
- The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. (2009, background): “Research on statistical learning (e.g., Saffran et al. 1996) shows that young infants are sensitive to language-specific transitional probabilities, correlational probabilities, and distributional features of the input (Höhle et al. 2004; Mintz 2006; Thiessen 2009).”