Séverine Millotte

Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning

Abstract Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “its pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen matching the novel verb. Infants correctly pointed more often towards the familiar action. To check that they did not simply perseverate in pointing at the familiar scene, control infants were taught novel nouns on the same visual stimuli (e.g. “un poune est là”/ “a poon is here”). Contrary to verb-learning infants, noun-learning infants pointed more often to the novel action. These results confirm the hypothesis that function words, and more generally syntactic structure, support early lexical acquisition.

Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition.

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results that test the plausibility of this hypothesis. These results are tied together within a model of the architecture of the first stages of language processing, and their acquisition.

Phrasal prosody disambiguates syntax

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundary cues, as produced by naïve speakers, constrain syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were inserted within locally ambiguous sentences that differed in their prosodic structure (e.g., [les pommes dures]…– hard apples… – versus [les pommes] [durent…] – apples last …– where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). In Experiment 1 six speakers, unaware of the ambiguities, recorded the sentences. Acoustical analyses showed that they all produced reliable prosodic cues (phrase-final lengthening and pitch rise). Experiment 2 tested whether listeners exploited these prosodic cues to constrain syntactic analysis. They listened to the sentences beginnings (cut after the ambiguous word) and completed them in writing. Their assignments of the target words to their correct syntactic categories were better than chance. We discuss these results in light of the on-going debate about the production of disambiguating prosody by speakers who are unaware of the ambiguities.

Phonological Phrase Boundaries Constrain the Online Syntactic Analysis of Spoken Sentences

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.

Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a determiner and vice-versa for nouns. These results suggest that 18-month-olds already know noun and verb contexts. As a result, they might be able to exploit them to categorize unknown words and constrain their possible meaning (nouns typically refer to objects whereas verbs typically refer to actions).

Individual differences in adult handwritten spelling-to-dictation.

We report an investigation of individual differences in handwriting latencies and number of errors in a spelling-to-dictation task. Eighty adult participants wrote a list of 164 spoken words (presented in two sessions). The participants were also evaluated on a vocabulary test (Deltour, 1993). Various multiple regression analyses were performed (on both writing latency and errors). The analysis of the item means showed that the reliable predictors of spelling latencies were acoustic duration, cumulative word frequency, phonology-to-orthographic (PO) consistency, the number of letters in the word and the interaction between cumulative word frequency, PO consistency and imageability. (Error rates were also predicted by frequency, consistency, length and the interaction between cumulative word frequency, PO consistency and imageability.) The analysis of the participant means (and trials) showed that (1) there was both within- and between-session reliability across the sets of items, (2) there was no trade-off between the utilization of lexical and non-lexical information, and (3) participants with high vocabulary knowledge were more accurate (and somewhat faster), and had a differential sensitivity to certain stimulus characteristics, than those with low vocabulary knowledge. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of orthographic word production.

Early Word Order Representations: Novel Arguments against Old Contradictions.

One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of childrens early representations of word order. While studies using preferential looking methods suggest that children as early as 20 months represent word order as an abstract, grammatical property, experiments using the Weird Word Order (WWO) paradigm suggest that it is represented as a lexical property until age four. In order to shed light on these contradictions, two types of arguments are developed. First, it is argued that the observations taken to support the lexical hypothesis, based on the WWO paradigm, have been incorrectly interpreted. Second, an experiment is reported using the standard WWO paradigm with minimal changes in the design. Two groups of French children were contrasted (mean ages 2;11 and 3;11). Both groups were found to (i) reproduce WWO at a similar, low rate; (ii) correct WWO at a similar rate, even with pseudo-verbs; (iii) reuse the grammatical, SVO order significantly more often than WWO; and (iv) produce grammatical markers, indicating productive use, in grammatical sentences only. We conclude that empirical evidence converges to support the grammatical hypothesis.

Abstract Knowledge of Word Order by 19 Months: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, since her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order, differentiating Verb-Object and Object-Verb languages, is represented very early on in an abstract, rule-like format. In contrast, constructivist theories assume that it is initially encoded as lexicalized, verb-specific knowledge. In order to address this issue experimentally, we combined the preferential looking paradigm using pseudo-verbs (following Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, 2006) with the weird word order paradigm (following Akhtar, 1999) adapted to comprehension. The results, based on highly reliable, coder-independent eye-tracking measures, provide the first direct evidence that as early as 19 months French-speaking infants have an abstract representation of the word order of their language.

Norms and reading times for acronyms in French

We collected subjective frequency, age-of-acquisition, and imageability norms for 319 acronyms from French adults. Objective printed frequency, bigram frequency, and lengths in letters, phonemes, and syllables, as well as orthographic neighbors, were computed. The time taken to read acronyms aloud was also recorded. Correlational analyses indicated that the relations between the psycholinguistic variables were similar to those usually found for common words (e.g., highly imageable acronyms were more frequent and learned earlier in life than less imageable acronyms), but were generally weaker in the former than in the latter. Linear mixed-model analyses performed on the reading latencies revealed that the main determinants were the voicing feature of initial phonemes, the type of pronunciation of the acronyms (ambiguous vs. unambiguous, typical vs. atypical characteristics), length (number of letters and number of syllables), together with bigram frequency, printed frequency, and imageability. Both objective frequency and imageability interacted reliably with the ambiguous typical and ambiguous atypical properties. Accuracy was predicted by the number of letters and by imageability factors: More errors occurred on longer than on shorter acronyms, and also more errors on less imageable than on more imageable acronyms. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings for the understanding of acronym reading are discussed. The entire set of norms and the acronym reading times (and accuracy scores), together with the acronym definitions, are provided as supplemental materials.

À la découverte des mots : le rôle de la prosodie dans l’acquisition du lexique et de la syntaxe

Les enfants qui acquierent leur langue maternelle doivent apprendre, entre autres choses, les mots de cette langue. Pour ce faire, ils doivent dune part extraire la forme sonore des mots donc segmenter la parole continue. Nous verrons dans une premiere partie que les informations prosodiques sont utilisees par les jeunes enfants pour trouver ou commencent et ou finissent les mots dans les phrases. Dautre part, les enfants doivent ensuite reussir a assigner un sens a ces formes sonores et nous verrons, dans une deuxieme partie, que cette tâche peut etre facilitee par certaines connaissances syntaxiques, comme la connaissance de la categorie grammaticale des mots. A nouveau, nous verrons que la prosodie a un role a jouer dans cette tâche, de maniere conjointe avec dautres indices presents dans le signal de parole, les mots grammaticaux.