Abstract
Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 56-74 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Cognitive Psychology |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 Aug |
| Externally published | Yes |
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Keywords
- Bootstrapping
- Corpus
- Headturn preference procedure
- Infant-directed speech
- Italian
- Japanese
- Language acquisition
- Prelexical infants
- Word order
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics and Language
Cite this
Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants : A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study. / Gervain, Judit; Nespor, Marina; Mazuka, Reiko; Horie, Ryota; Mehler, Jacques.
In: Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 1, 08.2008, p. 56-74.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants
T2 - A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study
AU - Gervain, Judit
AU - Nespor, Marina
AU - Mazuka, Reiko
AU - Horie, Ryota
AU - Mehler, Jacques
PY - 2008/8
Y1 - 2008/8
N2 - Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.
AB - Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.
KW - Bootstrapping
KW - Corpus
KW - Headturn preference procedure
KW - Infant-directed speech
KW - Italian
KW - Japanese
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Prelexical infants
KW - Word order
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=45449087270&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=45449087270&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001
DO - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001
M3 - Article
VL - 57
SP - 56
EP - 74
JO - Cognitive Psychology
JF - Cognitive Psychology
SN - 0010-0285
IS - 1
ER -