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

Alex A de Carvalho (1) , Isabelle Dautriche (2) , Séverine Millotte (3) , Christophe Anne (1)

1 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique
2 University of Edinburgh
3 LEAD - Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement [Dijon]

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.

Mots clés: Phrasal prosody; Langage -- Acquisition

Domaines: Sciences cognitives; Psychologie

Alex A de Carvalho, Isabelle Dautriche, Séverine Millotte, Christophe Anne. Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition. Pilar Prieto, Núria Esteve-Gibert. The development of prosody in first language acquisition, 23, John Benjamins publishing compagny, pp.17-35, 2018, Trends in language acquisition research (ISSN 1569-0644), 978-90-272-0059-4. ⟨hal-01996751⟩