Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and
lexical acquisition
Alex de Carvalho | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d’Études
Cognitives, (École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research
University)
Isabelle Dautriche | Centre for Language Evolution School of Philosophy,
Psychology and Language Sciences, University of
Edinburgh
Séverine Millotte | Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du
Développement, CNRS UMR 5022, UB, Université Bourgogne
Franche-Comté
Anne Christophe | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d’Études
Cognitives (École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research
University)
This chapter will review empirical findings on the perception of
phrasal prosody in very young infants, and how it develops in first
language acquisition. The ability to process phrasal prosody impacts
learning of important aspects of language, specifically word
segmentation and syntactic parsing. We will see that infants are
able to perceive crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end
of their first year of life, and that a few months later they are
able to exploit the prosodic structure of an utterance to constrain
its syntactic analysis, and therefore, to infer the meaning of
unknown words.
Article outline
Introduction
Early perception of prosodic cues
Using phrasal prosody to segment the speech stream into
words
The role of phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing in
children
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