Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Institut Pluridisciplinaire des Saints Pères, Université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris, France.
Cognition. 2011 Jul;120(1):119-35. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.03.004. Epub 2011 Apr 17.
This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent 'the boy(s) read(s)') where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.
本研究考察了法语学习婴儿对涉及主谓一致的语法非相邻依存关系的敏感性（例如，le/les garçons lit/lisent '男孩们读'），其中数量在主语 DP 的限定词和一致动词上都可听，并且依赖关系跨越两个句法短语。法语主谓一致的这一子系统的另一个特点是动词上的数字标记在语音上非常不规则。尽管存在挑战，但 24 个月和 18 个月大的 HPP 结果表明，婴儿对这两个数量依存关系都有一定的了解：在单数限定词 le 和非相邻单数动词形式之间，以及在复数限定词 les 和非相邻复数动词形式之间。一项控制实验表明，婴儿对已知的动词形式做出了反应，而不是对语音规则做出了反应。鉴于在语料库研究中记录的成人输入中这种形式很少，因此这些结果被解释为 18 个月大的婴儿具有在自然语言中跨一系列形态语音不一致和不频繁的项目提取复杂模式的能力的证据。
