说英语的学龄前儿童可以使用短语韵律进行句法分析。

English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing.

作者信息

de Carvalho Alex, Lidz Jeffrey, Tieu Lyn, Bleam Tonia, Christophe Anne

机构信息

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives, École normale supérieure - PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France

Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA

出版信息

J Acoust Soc Am. 2016 Jun;139(6):EL216. doi: 10.1121/1.4954385.

DOI:10.1121/1.4954385

PMID:27369175

Abstract

This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). The words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. In an oral completion task, 4- to 5-year-olds successfully exploited the sentence's prosodic structure to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, mirroring previous results in French (but challenging previous English-language results) and providing cross-linguistic evidence for the role of phrasal prosody in children's syntactic analysis.

摘要

本研究测试了美国学龄前儿童运用短语韵律来限制其对包含名词/动词同音异义词的局部歧义句进行句法分析的能力（例如，[婴儿苍蝇] [躲在阴影里] 与 [婴儿] [放风筝]，括号表示韵律边界）。同音异义词之后的单词被遮蔽，因此韵律线索是唯一的歧义消除信息。在一项口头完成任务中，4至5岁的儿童成功地利用句子的韵律结构为目标词分配了合适的句法类别，这与之前在法语中的研究结果一致（但对之前英语研究的结果提出了挑战），并为短语韵律在儿童句法分析中的作用提供了跨语言证据。