Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: Evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French
Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: Evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2011.03.004
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发表时间：
2011-07-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Legendre, Geraldine
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nazzi, Thierry;Barriere, Isabelle;Legendre, Geraldine
本研究考察了学法语的婴儿对涉及主谓一致的语法非相邻依存关系的敏感性(例如，LE/Les Garcons Lit/Lisent‘the Boy(S)Read(S)’)，其中数字在主语DP和一致动词的限定词上都可以听到，而且这种依存关系跨越了两个句法短语。法语主谓一致的这一子系统的另一个特殊性是，动词上的数字标记在语音上是高度不规则的。尽管存在挑战，24个月和18个月婴儿的HPP结果显示了两个数字依赖：单数限定词LE和非相邻单数动词形式之间以及复数限定词和非相邻复数动词形式之间的知识。一项对照实验表明，婴儿对已知的动词形式做出反应，而不是语音规则。由于通过语料库研究记录的成人输入中此类形式很少，这些结果被解释为18个月大的婴儿有能力从自然语言中一系列形态不一致和不常见的项目中提取复杂模式的证据。(C)2011爱思唯尔B.V.保留所有权利。
This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garcons lit/lisent 'the boy(s) read(s)') where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.