Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study
Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.12.001
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发表时间：
2008-08-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Mehler, Jacques
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gervain, Judit;Nespor, Marina;Mehler, Jacques
学习语序是婴儿在语言习得过程中最早完成的技能之一。（1973年）。第一语言：早期阶段，剑桥，MA：哈佛大学出版社。人们提出了两种理论来解释这一事实。建构主义/词汇主义理论[Tomasello，M.（2000年）的第10/2000号决议。幼儿有成人的句法能力吗？认知，74（3），209 - 253。]认为词序是为每个词项或结构单独学习的。生成理论[Chomsky，N，（1995）.极简主义方案。剑桥，MA：麻省理工学院出版社]，另一方面，声称词序是一个抽象的和一般的属性，从独立于单个单词的输入中确定。在这里，我们表明，8个月大的日本和意大利婴儿有相反的顺序偏好在人工语法实验，反映了他们各自的母语相反的词序。这表明，婴儿拥有一定的词序表征的前词汇，支持生成论的观点。我们提出了一个基于频率的自举机制来解释我们的结果，认为婴儿可能会建立这种表示跟踪函子和内容的话，通过他们的不同的频率分布确定的顺序。我们调查的频率和语序模式在婴儿为导向的日语和意大利语语料库，以支持这一主张。(C)2007年爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
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. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.