Phrasal prosody is believed to be crucial for syntactic and lexical acquisition, since prosodic boundaries in speech tend to coincide with lexical and syntactic boundaries. However, research on children's ability to exploit prosodic information for parsing reports mixed results, with some providing positive evidence in French while many studies in other languages fail to observe this ability in children up to 6-years-old. To further investigate whether the discrepancies between these studies stem from cross-linguistic or methodological differences, we adapted a recent preferential-looking experiment conducted with French children to a different language: Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese-learning 3-to-4-year-olds were presented with either ellipsis (e.g. [The tiger is poking]! [The duck too]!) or transitive sentences (e.g. [The tiger] [is poking the duck too]!), while watching two videos side-by-side, one depicting the transitive interpretation of the sentences, and another depicting the ellipsis interpretation. Results showed that 3-to-4-year-olds successfully exploited prosodic information to distinguish ellipsis from transitive sentences and therefore constrain their parsing. Children in the ellipsis condition looked more at the video depicting the ellipsis interpretation than children in the transitive condition. This result provides cross-linguistic evidence for the role of prosody in constraining parsing in young children.
原文链接
分享
引用
