Gerken L, Jusczyk P W, Mandel D R
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo 14260.
Cognition. 1994 Mar;51(3):237-65. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90055-8.
According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP condition, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine if other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.
根据句法习得的韵律自引导理论，语言学习者利用句法边界与韵律变化之间的相关性（例如停顿、元音拉长、基频大幅增减）来提示句法成分的存在和排列。然而，近期的语言学理论认为，韵律并非直接反映句法结构，而是由诸如音系短语等独立的韵律单位所支配。为了检验这一观点对韵律自引导假设的影响，实验1中的婴儿被呈现了一些句子，这些句子在主语名词短语（NP）和动词之间或动词之后插入了停顿。一半的婴儿听的是带有词汇NP主语的句子，其中韵律结构与句法结构一致。另一半婴儿听的是带有代词主语的句子，其中韵律结构并不反映句法结构。在一个偏好倾听范式中，词汇NP条件下的婴儿对包含主语和动词之间停顿的材料倾听时间更长，主语和动词是主要的句法成分。然而，在代词NP条件下，婴儿对两个停顿位置的倾听时间没有差异。为了确定其他包含代词主语的句子类型是否可能提供有关这些成分句法成分的信息，实验2中的婴儿听了带有代词主语的是非疑问句，其中韵律结构反映了主语的成分。当在主语和动词之间插入停顿而不是在动词之后插入停顿时，婴儿倾听时间更长。综合来看，我们的结果表明，单个句子中的韵律信息并不总是足以确定句法结构。相反，学习者必须进行积极的推理过程，利用跨句子比较和其他类型的信息来得出正确的句法表征。
