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In:The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 17–35

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Chapter 2
Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition

 | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d’Études Cognitives, (École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University)
 | Centre for Language Evolution School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
 | Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du Développement, CNRS UMR 5022, UB, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté
 | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d’Études Cognitives (École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University)
Published online: 24 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.02car
This chapter will review empirical findings on the perception of phrasal prosody in very young infants, and how it develops in first language acquisition. The ability to process phrasal prosody impacts learning of important aspects of language, specifically word segmentation and syntactic parsing. We will see that infants are able to perceive crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end of their first year of life, and that a few months later they are able to exploit the prosodic structure of an utterance to constrain its syntactic analysis, and therefore, to infer the meaning of unknown words.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Early perception of prosodic cues
  • Using phrasal prosody to segment the speech stream into words
  • The role of phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing in children
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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