Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T07:17:41.233Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Finding words and word structure in artificial speech: the development of infants' sensitivity to morphosyntactic regularities*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

ERIKA MARCHETTO  and
LUCA L. BONATTI
ERIKA MARCHETTO
Affiliation:
SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
LUCA L. BONATTI*
Affiliation:
ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Centre for Brain and Cognition, Barcelona, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Luca L. Bonatti, ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, C. Roc Boronat, 138, Edifici Tanger, 55.110, 08018 Barcelona, ES. e-mail: lucabonatti@mac.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word structure in artificial speech snippets embodying properties of morphological constructions. We show that 12-month-olds use statistical relationships between syllables to extract words from continuous streams, but find word-internal regularities only if the streams are segmented. Seven-month-olds fail both tasks. Thus, 12-month-olds infants possess the resources to analyze the internal composition of words if the speech contains segmentation information. However, 7-month-old infants may not possess them, although they can track several statistical relations. This developmental difference suggests that morphosyntactic sensitivity may require computational resources extending beyond the detection of simple statistics.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 873 - 902
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by grants PSI2012-31961 and FVG ‘PsyScope XL’ to L.L.B, and by the Fyssen Foundation Grant to E.M. We thank A. Isaja, L. Filippin, F. Gandolfo, M. Sjekloca, K. Brink, N. Sebastián Gallés, A. Endress, K. Mehta, and J.M. Toro for scientific discussions and technical support.

References

REFERENCES

Aronoff, M. & Fudeman, K. A. (2011). What is morphology, 2nd ed. Chichester & Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R. & Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science 9(4), 321–4.Google Scholar
Bergelson, E. & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(9), 3253–8.Google Scholar
Bisetto, A. & Melloni, C. (2008). Parsynthetic compounding. Lingue e Linguaggio VII(2), 1–27.Google Scholar
Bonatti, L. L. (2008). On pigeons, humans, language and the mind. In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. (eds), The innate mind: foundations and future, 216–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bonatti, L. L., Peña, M., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2005). Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: the role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing. Psychological Science 16(6), 451–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81(2), B33−44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caprin, C. & Guasti, M. T. (2009). The acquisition of morphosyntax in Italian: a cross-sectional study. Applied Psycholinguistics 30(1), 23–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. D., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M. & Provost, J. (1993). PsyScope: an interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers 25, 257–71.Google Scholar
De Diego-Balaguer, R., Fuentemilla, L. & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2011). Brain dynamics sustaining rapid rule extraction from speech. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23(10), 3105–20.Google Scholar
de Diego-Balaguer, R. & Lopez-Barroso, D. (2010). Cognitive and neural mechanisms sustaining rule learning from speech. Language Learning 60(Supplement 2), 151–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Diego-Balaguer, R., Toro, J. M., Rodriguez-Fornells, A. & Bachoud-Levi, A. C. (2007). Different neurophysiological mechanisms underlying word and rule extraction from speech. PLoS ONE 2(11), e1175.Google Scholar
Dutoit, T., Pagel, V., Bataille, F. & Vreken, O. (1996). The MBROLA project: towards a set of high-quality speech synthesizers free of use for non-commercial purposes. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Endress, A. & Bonatti, L. L. (2007). Rapid learning of syllable classes from a perceptually continuous speech stream. Cognition 105(2), 247–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Endress, A. D. & Mehler, J. (2009). Primitive computations in speech processing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 62(11), 2187–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Endress, A. D., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2009). Perceptual and memory constraints on language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(8), 348–53.Google Scholar
Endress, A. D., Scholl, B. J. & Mehler, J. (2005). The role of salience in the extraction of algebraic rules. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134(3), 406–19.Google Scholar
Gertner, Y. & Fisher, C. (2012). Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension. Cognition 124(1), 85–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gervain, J., Macagno, F., Cogoi, S., Peña, M. & Mehler, J. (2008b). The neonate brain detects speech structure. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(37), 14222–27.Google Scholar
Gervain, J., Nespor, M., Mazuka, R., Horie, R. & Mehler, J. (2008a). Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese−Italian cross-linguistic study. Cognitive Psychology 57(1), 56–74.Google Scholar
Gervain, J., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Díaz, B., Laka, I., Mazuka, R., Yamane, N. N., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2013). Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 1–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gervain, J. & Werker, J. F. (2013a). Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Nature Communications 4(1490), 1–6.Google Scholar
Gervain, J. & Werker, J. F. (2013b). Learning non-adjacent regularities at age 0;7. Journal of Child Language 40(4), 860–72.Google Scholar
Gómez, R. L. (2002). Variability and detection of invariant structure. Psychological Science 13(5), 431–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gómez, R. L. & Gerken, L. (1999). Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition 70(2), 109–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gómez, R. L. & Lakusta, L. (2004). A first step in form-based category abstraction by 12-month-old infants. Developmental Science 7(5), 567–80.Google Scholar
Gómez, R. L. & Maye, J. (2005). The developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency learning. Infancy 7(2), 183–206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gonzalez-Gomez, N. & Nazzi, T. (2012). Phonotactic acquisition in healthy preterm infants. Developmental Science 15(6), 885–94.Google Scholar
Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Poltrock, S. & Nazzi, T. (2013). A ‘bat’ is easier to learn than a ‘tab’: effects of relative phonotactic frequency on infant word learning. PLoS ONE 8(3), e59601.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guasti, M. T. (1993). Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: finite and nonfinite verbs. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 3(1), 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, M. T. (2002). Language acquisition: the growth of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Halberda, J. (2003). The development of a word-learning strategy. Cognition 87(1), B23−34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (1996). The origins of grammar: evidence from early language comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Weissenborn, J., Kiefer, D., Schulz, A. & Schmitz, M. (2004). Functional elements in infants’ speech processing: the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements. Infancy 5(3), 341–53.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A. & Norris, D. (2003). Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants. Cognitive Psychology 46(1), 65–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, E. K. & Tyler, M. D. (2010). Testing the limits of statistical learning for word segmentation. Developmental Science 13(2), 339–45.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W. & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants’ detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 29(1), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kam, C. L. H. & Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: the roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1(2), 151–95.Google Scholar
Kam, C. L. H. & Newport, E. L. (2009). Getting it right by getting it wrong: when learners change languages. Cognitive Psychology 59(1), 30–66.Google ScholarPubMed
Langus, A., Marchetto, E., Bion, R. A. H. & Nespor, M. (2012). Can prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech? Journal of Memory and Language 66(1), 285–306.Google Scholar
Lany, J. & Saffran, J. R. (2010). From statistics to meaning: infants’ acquisition of lexical categories. Psychological Science 21(2), 284–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lavale Ortiz, R. M. (2011). Sensory-emotional denominal causative verbs. In Honrubia, J. L. C. & Rosique, S. R. (eds), Spanish word formation and lexical creation (IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature), 107–43. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., Pelucchi, B. & Saffran, J. R. (2011). Isolated words enhance statistical language learning in infancy. Developmental Science 14(6), 1323–9.Google Scholar
López-Barroso, D., Catani, M., Ripollés, P., Dell'Acqua, F., Rodríguez-Fornells, A. & de Diego-Balaguer, R. (2013). Word learning is mediated by the left arcuate fasciculus. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(32), 13168–73.Google Scholar
Lopez-Barroso, D., de Diego-Balaguer, R., Cunillera, T., Camara, E., Münte, T. F. & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2011). Language learning under working memory constraints correlates with microstructural differences in the ventral language pathway. Cerebral Cortex 21(12), 2742–50.Google Scholar
Marchetto, E. & Bonatti, L. L. (2013). Words and possible words in early language acquisition. Cognitive Psychology 67(3), 130–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Rao, S. B. & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science 283(5398), 77–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mattys, S. L., Jusczyk, P. W., Luce, P. A. & Morgan, J. L. (1999). Phonotactic and prosodic effects on word segmentation in infants. Cognitive Psychology 38(4), 465–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McNealy, K., Mazziotta, J. C. & Dapretto, M. (2006). Cracking the language code: neural mechanisms underlying speech parsing. Journal of Neuroscience 26(29), 7629–39.Google Scholar
McNealy, K., Mazziotta, J. C. & Dapretto, M. (2010). The neural basis of speech parsing in children and adults. Developmental Science 13(2), 385–406.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mersad, K. & Nazzi, T. (2012). When Mommy comes to the rescue of statistics: infants combine top-down and bottom-up cues to segment speech. Language Learning and Development 8(3), 303–15.Google Scholar
Mintz, T. H. (2013). The segmentation of sub-lexical morphemes in English-learning 15-month-olds. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 1–12.Google Scholar
Nespor, M. & Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science 14(1), 11–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onnis, L., Monaghan, P., Richmond, K. & Chater, N. (2005). Phonology impacts segmentation in online speech processing. Journal of Memory and Language 53(2), 225–37.Google Scholar
Payne, T. E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge & New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pelucchi, B., Hay, J. F. & Saffran, J. R. (2009). Statistical learning in a natural language by 8-month-old infants. Child Development 80(3), 674–85.Google Scholar
Peña, M., Bonatti, L. L., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2002). Signal-driven computations in speech processing. Science 298(5593), 604–7.Google Scholar
Pizzuto, E. & Caselli, M. C. (1992). The acquisition of Italian morphology: implications for models of language development. Journal of Child Language 19(3), 491–557.Google Scholar
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N. & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274(5294), 1926–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L. & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: the role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35(4), 606–21.Google Scholar
Saffran, J. R. & Wilson, D. P. (2003). From syllables to syntax: multilevel statistical learning by 12-month-old infants. Infancy 4(2), 273–84.Google Scholar
Santelmann, L. M. & Jusczyk, P. W. (1998). Sensitivity to discontinuous dependencies in language learners: evidence for limitations in processing space. Cognition 69(2), 105–34.Google Scholar
Shi, R. & Lepage, M. (2008). The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants. Developmental Science 11(3), 407–13.Google Scholar
Shi, R., Werker, J. F. & Cutler, A. (2006). Recognition and representation of function words in English-learning infants. Infancy 10(2), 187–98.Google Scholar
Shukla, M., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2007). An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 54(1), 1–32.Google Scholar
Shukla, M., White, K. S. & Aslin, R. N. (2011). Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-month-old infants. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108(15), 6038–43.Google Scholar
Slaughter, V. & Suddendorf, T. (2007). Participant loss due to ‘fussiness’ in infant visual paradigms: a review of the last 20 years. Infant Behavior and Development 30(3), 505–14.Google Scholar
Stager, C. L. & Werker, J. F. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature 388, 381–2.Google Scholar
Thiessen, E. D. & Erickson, L. C. (2013). Discovering words in fluent speech: the contribution of two kinds of statistical information. Frontiers in Psychology 3, 1–10.Google Scholar
Toro, J. M., Nespor, M., Mehler, J. & Bonatti, L. L. (2008). Finding words and rules in a speech stream: functional differences between vowels and consonants. Psychological Science 19(2), 137–44.Google Scholar
Torrens, V. (1995). The acquisition of inflection in Spanish and Catalan. In Schütze, C. T., Ganger, J. B. & Broihier, K. J. (eds), Papers on language processing and acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MiTWPL, Department of Linguistics, MIT.Google Scholar
Vilares, J., Cabrero, D. & Alonso, M. (2001). Applying productive derivational morphology to term indexing of Spanish texts. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing 2004, 336–48. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Werker, J. F. & Tees, R. C. (1983). Developmental changes across childhood in the perception of non-native speech sounds. Canadian Journal of Psychology 37(2), 278–86.Google Scholar
Werker, J. F. & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7(1), 49–63.Google Scholar
Yang, C. D. (2004). Universal Grammar, statistics or both? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(10), 451–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yoshida, K. A., Iversen, J. R., Patel, A. D., Mazuka, R., Nito, H., Gervain, J. J., & Werker, J. F. (2010). The development of perceptual grouping biases in infancy: a Japanese−English cross-linguistic study. Cognition 115(2), 356–61.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Marchetto and Bonatti Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material

Download Marchetto and Bonatti Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 170.7 KB