Crosslinguistic investigations on the development of rhythmic preferences in German and French infants

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Recent research on early language acquisition has provided evidence that rhythmic information is one of the earliest cues infants use to bootstrap into the acquisition of lexical and syntactic properties of the target language (e.g., Morgan & Demuth, 2006) and that infants acquire the specific rhythmic and other prosodic properties of their target language within the first months of life (for a review and recent data, see Höhle, Bijeljac- Babic, Herold, Weissenborn & Nazzi, in press). Less is known about the question of how general auditory biases interact with the specific acoustic properties of the target language. Taking a crosslinguistic perspective, this project will compare early perceptual preferences of rhythmic patterns in infants learning languages that fundamentally differ in their rhythmic organization. Whereas German shows a stressed-based rhythm with a trochaic dominance on the level of lexical stress, French has a syllable-based rhythm with no lexical stress but phrase-final prominence due to final lengthening. Our previous developmental work on stress pattern preference and discrimination has revealed perceptual differences between monolingual French and German infants (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac- Babic, Serres, Höhle & Nazzi, in preparation). Following this work, and to establish predicted effects of general acoustic mechanisms for the acquisition of the trochaic bias, we will first question the claim that the iambic/trochaic law applies independently of the properties of the native language (Hay & Diehl, 2007) by reassessing this law in monolingual German and French adults and infants, using more language-like conditions (Part 1). Second, we will expand our developmental and adult work on stress pattern preference (Höhle et al., in press), stress discrimination (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac-Babic et al., in preparation), and the application of the iambic/trochaic law to bilingual French-German adults and infants in order to evaluate the influence of a bilingual (French-German) environment on prosodic processing (Part 2).