THE ROLE OF PROSODY ON THE PERCEPTION OF WORD-ORDER DIFFERENCES BY 14-MONTH-OLD GERMAN INFANTS

Ricardo Augusto Hoffmann Bion, Barbara Höhle & Michaela Schmitz
University of Potsdam

ID 1311
[full paper]

Fourteen-month-old German infants can distinguish between isolated non-finite verb-noun and noun-verb verb-phrases [1]. This study investigated whether prosody is the cause of this differential attention. The prosodic content of 144 verb-phrases was manipulated, and the impact of this manipulation on infants’ perception was examined. Our results show that, even though prosody does influence infants’ perception, the segmental content of phrases (i.e., morphological markers) is also crucial for German infants’ early sensitivity to word-order differences within verb-phrases.