Department of Psychology, Occidental College.
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Canada.
J Child Lang. 2024 Jan;51(1):137-167. doi: 10.1017/S0305000922000460. Epub 2022 Oct 26.
Cross-linguistically, statements and questions broadly differ in syntactic organization. To learn the syntactic properties of each sentence type, learners might first rely on non-syntactic information. This paper analyzed prosodic differences between infant-directed -questions and statements to determine what kinds of cues might be available. We predicted there would be a significant difference depending on the first words that appear in -questions (e.g., two closed-class words; meaning words from a category that rarely changes) compared to the variety of first words found in statements. We measured F0, duration, and intensity of the first two words in statements and -questions in naturalistic speech from 13 mother-child dyads in the Brent corpus of the CHILDES database. Results found larger differences between sentence-types when the second word was an open-class not a closed-class word, suggesting a relationship between prosodic and syntactic information in an utterance-initial position that infants may use to make sentence-type distinctions.
从跨语言的角度来看，陈述句和疑问句在句法结构上有很大的不同。为了学习每种句子类型的句法属性，学习者可能首先依赖于非句法信息。本文分析了婴儿指向的疑问句和陈述句之间的韵律差异，以确定可能存在哪些线索。我们预测，与陈述句中发现的各种首词相比，疑问句中首词（例如，两个封闭类词；来自一个很少变化的类别）会出现显著差异。我们在自然语言环境中测量了儿童发展语料库中的 13 对母子对的陈述和疑问句中前两个词的 F0、时长和强度。结果发现，当第二个词是开放类词而不是封闭类词时，句子类型之间的差异更大，这表明在话语起始位置韵律和句法信息之间存在关系，婴儿可能会利用这种关系来做出句子类型的区分。
