NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ1033771
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1522-7227
EISSN: N/A
The Effect of Prosody on Distributional Learning in 12- to 13-Month-Old Infants
Thothathiri, Malathi; Snedeker, Jesse; Hannon, Erin
Infant and Child Development, v21 n2 p135-145 Mar-Apr 2012
Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve- to thirteen-month-old infants were exposed to an artificial language comprised of 3-word-sentences of the form aXb and cYd, where X and Y words differed in the number of syllables. Training sentences contained a prosodic boundary between either the first and the second word or the second and the third word. Subsequently, infants were tested on novel test sentences that contained new X and Y words and also contained a flat prosody with no grouping cues. Infants successfully discriminated between novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, suggesting that the learned adjacent relations can be abstracted across words and prosodic conditions. Under the conditions tested, prosody may be only a weak constraint on syntactic categorization.
Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2429/WileyCDA
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Massachusetts
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A