Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax acquisition that rest on three major assumptions grounded in the infant literature: First, infants have access to phrasal prosody; second, they pay attention to words situated at the edges of prosodic boundaries; third, they know the meaning of a handful of words. The models take as input a corpus of French child-directed speech tagged with prosodic boundaries and assign syntactic labels to prosodic phrases. The excellent performance of these models shows the feasibility of the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, since elements of syntactic structure can be constructed by relying on prosody, function words, and a minimal semantic knowledge.
Source: Language Acquisition
Institutions: University of Konstanz, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, École Normale Supérieure - PSL, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Université Paris Diderot
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Language Learning in context, Empirical Foundations of Linguistics : data, methods, models, Paris Sciences et Lettres, G4190806336, G471331628, Early language acquisition : experimental and computational approaches, Institute of Cognitive Studies of Ecole normale superieure, G6759105742, G7240651115, G782245399, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité
OpenAlex ID: W2016120415