Geffen Susan, Mintz Toben H
Department of Psychology,University of Southern California.
Department of Psychology,University of Southern California,and Department of Linguistics,University of Southern California.
J Child Lang. 2017 Jul;44(4):968-994. doi: 10.1017/S0305000916000349. Epub 2016 Jul 18.
In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother-infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, but wh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives from wh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.
在许多语言中，陈述句和疑问句在词序属性以及更广泛的句法结构方面存在差异。因此，为了学习这两种句子类型不同的句法属性，学习者首先必须能够利用非句法信息将它们区分开来。韵律信息通常被认为是进行此类区分的有用依据，尽管尚未有关于婴儿可利用的韵律线索的系统研究报告。对三组以标准美式英语为母语的母婴对话中母亲言语的分析发现，一般疑问句在最后两个音节的音高和时长模式上与陈述句不同，但特殊疑问句并非如此。因此，虽然韵律不太可能有助于区分陈述句和特殊疑问句，但面向婴儿的言语提供了婴儿可用于区分陈述句和一般疑问句的韵律信息。我们将讨论学习者在句法习得的背景下如何利用这些信息来识别所有疑问句形式。
