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
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in the frame of the CALACEI NEST PATHFINDER initiative ‘What in means to be human’, by a program grant from the J. S. McDonnell Foundation and by the PRIN 2005 ‘General and specific mechanisms in the acquisition of recursivity’. The Japan corpus and infant experiments were funded by RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Judit Gervain acknowledges the financial support of the Central European Initiative (CEI) Research Fellowship. We thank Luca Bonatti for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, Alessio Isaja and Luca Filippin for technical support, Jeanne Moussu and Marijana Sjekloća for their help in testing the Italian infants, Kyoko Shirasawa-Potapov, Mihoko Hasegawa, Mahoko Yamaguchi, and Mits Ota for their assistance in testing the Japanese infants, and Ken’ya Nishikawa for providing information about the Japanese infant-directed corpus.
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
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001
DO - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 18241850
AN - SCOPUS:45449087270
VL - 57
SP - 56
EP - 74
JO - Cognitive Psychology
JF - Cognitive Psychology
SN - 0010-0285
IS - 1
ER -