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Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2007

SUSANNE GRASSMANN  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
SUSANNE GRASSMANN*
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Susanne Grassmann, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

German children aged 2 ; 1 heard a sentence containing a nonce noun and a nonce verb (Der Feks miekt). Either the noun or the verb was prosodically highlighted by increased pitch, duration and loudness. Independently, either the object or the action in the ongoing referential scene was the new element in the situation. Children learned the nonce noun only when it was both highlighted prosodically and the object in the scene was referentially new. They did not learn the nonce verb in any condition. These results suggest that from early in linguistic development, young children understand that prosodic salience in a sentence indicates referential newness.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2007 , pp. 677 - 687
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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