Session L1 Acquisition II:First Language Acquisition II
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| L1 Acquisition II-1 |
THE ROLE OF PROSODY ON THE PERCEPTION OF WORD-ORDER DIFFERENCES BY 14-MONTH-OLD GERMAN INFANTS
Ricardo Augusto Hoffmann Bion, University of Potsdam Barbara Höhle, University of Potsdam Michaela Schmitz, University of Potsdam Paper File |
| 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. | |
| L1 Acquisition II-2 |
INFANTS’ RECOGNITION OF FUNCTION WORDS IN CONTINUOUS SPEECH
Rushen Shi, Université du Québec à Montréal Paper File |
| This study tests the hypothesis that function words are among the earliest word forms segmented by preverbal infants. In a visual fixation procedure, French-learning 8-month-old infants were familiarized to a function word, mes or ta. All infants were then tested with passages containing mes vs. ta. Looking times during the presentation of the two passage types were expected to differ if infants segmented the target functor. The results showed a significant interaction of passage type and sex. Although the direction of the looking preference is different for the two sexes, both groups showed a significant difference in listening times to the passage containing the target versus that containing the non-target. This suggests that both groups segmented the function words. The implications of functional elements for early lexical and syntactic acquisition are discussed. | |
| L1 Acquisition II-3 |
Acquiring rhythmically different languages in a bilingual context
Conxita Lleó, Department of Romance Languages, University of Hamburg Martin Rakow, Research Center on Multilingualism, University of Hamburg Margaret Kehoe Winkler, Research Center on Multilingualism, University of Hamburg Paper File |
| Using the Pairwise Variability Index (Grabe & Low, 2002), the rhythmic patterns of 3;0 year old German and Spanish monolingual and bilingual children are examined. Whereas the PVIs of monolingual Spanish data are low and those of monolingual German data are high, the data of the bilinguals do not greatly differ across languages. The PVIs of the bilinguals in German do not differ from those of the monolinguals, but the consonantal intervals of the bilinguals in Spanish are characterized by higher variability than those of the Spanish monolinguals. Several explanatory hypotheses are discussed, and an interpretation, which posits that consonantal intervals reflect properties of the language-specific phonology, is proposed. This implies that only the vocalic PVIs correlate with rhythmic class. | |