Seikei University, Japan.
University of Toronto, Canada.
J Child Lang. 2021 May;48(3):429-453. doi: 10.1017/S0305000920000367. Epub 2020 Jun 29.
Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children had acquired the lexical prosody (contrast between accented and unaccented words), a pre-requisite for downstep realization. While downstep, the prosodic phrasing involved in the complex NPs in this study, was established, children showed interspeaker variation with the metrical boost, a feature that distinguishes recursively embedded NPs from non-recursive NPs. However, variability was also found in adults, indicating that, in contrast to previous results, prosodic encoding of syntax is generally unreliable in adult speech. Finally, the magnitude of metrical boost was not correlated to children's ability to produce recursive possessives, suggesting that prosody does not help bootstrap Japanese children's recursive phrases.
递归 NPs 较难生成且出现较晚。我们比较了日语为母语的 5 岁和 6 岁儿童（n=28）和成年人（n=10）的韵律和句法能力。据报道，日语的句法结构通过降阶和韵律提升在韵律上标记。诱发模仿任务的结果表明，儿童已经获得了词汇韵律（重读音节和非重读音节的对比），这是降阶实现的前提。虽然在建立涉及本研究复杂 NPs 的韵律短语时，儿童的降阶出现了韵律提升的变化，这是递归嵌套 NPs 与非递归 NPs 的区别特征。然而，在成年人中也发现了变异性，表明与之前的结果相反，句法的韵律编码在成人言语中通常是不可靠的。最后，韵律提升的幅度与儿童生成递归所有格的能力无关，表明韵律无助于引导日语儿童生成递归短语。
