Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T18:53:49.911Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosodic disambiguation of noun/verb homophones in child-directed speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2016

ERIN CONWELL
ERIN CONWELL*
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
*
Address for correspondence: Erin Conwell, North Dakota State University, NDSU Dept. 2765, P.O. Box 6050, Fargo, ND 58108-6050. tel: 1-701-231-6123; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus data, this study asks whether noun and verb uses of ambiguous words might differ prosodically as a function of their grammatical category in child-directed speech. The results show that noun and verb uses of ambiguous words in sentence-medial positions do differ from one another in terms of duration, vowel duration, pitch change, and vowel quality measures. However, sentence-final tokens are not different as a function of the category in which they were used. The availability of prosodic cues to category in natural child-directed speech could allow learners using a distributional bootstrapping approach to avoid conflating grammatical categories.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 734 - 751
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by Grant 1R15HD077519-01 to the author from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The contents of this paper are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or NIH. Additionally, I thank Brenden Melvie, Katelyn Tallas, Matthew Kramer, Felix Pichardo, Cheyenne Brady, Adrienne MacDonald, Elisabeth Dukowitz, and Alexandra Howatt for their assistance with the token extraction and measurement, Alejandrina Cristia for sharing her PRAAT scripts, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Baayen, H. R., Piepenbrock, R. & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database. Online: <http://celex.mpi.nl/>..>Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. M. & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. ArXiv e-print, online: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5823>..>Google Scholar
Bernstein Ratner, N. (1984). Patterns of vowel modification in mother–child speech. Journal of Child Language 11, 557–78.Google Scholar
Bernstein Ratner, N. (1986). Durational cues which mark clause boundaries in mother–child speech. Phonetics 14, 303–9.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3·67, online: <http://www.praat.org/>..>Google Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J., Golinkoff, R. M. & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: familiar names help launch babies into speech stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16, 298–304.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1982). Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquisition data: implications of developmental errors with causative verbs. Quaderni di Semantica 3, 5–66.Google Scholar
Bushnell, E. W. & Maratsos, M. P. (1984). ‘Spooning’ and ‘basketing’: children's dealing with accidental gaps in the lexicon. Child Development 55, 893–902.Google Scholar
Cartwright, T. A. & Brent, M. R. (1997). Syntactic categorization in early language acquisition: formalizing the role of distributional analysis. Cognition 63, 121–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. (1982). The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art (pp. 309–426). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Conwell, E. (2009). Resolving ambicategoricality in language acquisition: the role of perceptual cues. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brown University, Providence, RI.Google Scholar
Conwell, E. (2015). Neural responses to category ambiguous words. Neuropsychologia 69, 85–92.Google Scholar
Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. L. (2012). Is it a noun or is it a verb? Resolving the ambicategoricality problem. Language Learning and Development 8, 87–112.Google Scholar
Cristia, A. & Seidl, A. (2014). The hyperarticulation hypothesis of child-directed speech. Journal of Child Language 41, 913–34.Google Scholar
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. (2006). Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Language and Speech 49, 137–74.Google Scholar
Ferguson, C. A. (1964). Baby talk in six languages. American Anthropologist 66, 103–14.Google Scholar
Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers’ speech to infants: Is the melody the message? Child Development 60, 1497–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., de Boysson-Bardies, B. & Fukui, I. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers’ and fathers’ speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language 16, 477–501.Google Scholar
Fisher, C. & Tokura, H. (1996). Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: crosslinguistic evidence. Child Development 67, 3192–218.Google Scholar
Francis, W. N. & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage: lexicon & grammar. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gahl, S. (2008). Time and thyme are not homophones: the effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84, 474–96.Google Scholar
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C. & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science 17, 684–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gleitman, L. R. & Wanner, E. (1982). Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art (pp. 3–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M. & Alioto, A. (1995). Infant-directed speech facilitates lexical learning in adults hearing Chinese: implications for language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 22, 703–26.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Weissenborn, J., Kiefer, D., Schulz, A. & Schmitz, M. (2004). Functional elements in infants’ speech processing: the role of determiners in syntactic categorization of lexical elements. Infancy 5, 341–53.Google Scholar
Howell, P. & Kadi-Hanifi, K. (1991). Comparison of prosodic properties between read and spontaneous speech material. Speech Communication 10, 163–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelly, M. H. (1988). Phonological biases in grammatical category shifts. Journal of Memory and Language 27, 343–58.Google Scholar
Kelly, M. H. & Bock, J. K. (1988). Stress in time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, 389–403.Google Scholar
Kuhl, P. K., Andruski, J. E., Chistovich, I. A., Chistovich, L. A., Kozhevnikova, E. V., Ryskina, V., et al. (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science 277, 684–6.Google Scholar
Li, A., Shi, R. & Hua, W. (2010). Prosodic cues to noun and verb categories in infant-directed Mandarin speech. Speech Prosody 100088, 1–4.Google Scholar
Lippeveld, M. & Oshima-Takane, Y. (2014). The effect of input on children's cross-categorical use of polysemous noun–verb pairs. Language Acquisition 22, 209–39.Google Scholar
Lippeveld, M. & Oshima-Takane, Y. (2015). Nouns to verbs and verbs to nouns: When do children acquire class-extension rules for deverbal nouns and denominal verbs? Applied Psycholinguistics 36, 559–88.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. J. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. & Chalkley, M. A. (1980). The internal language of children's syntax: the ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories. In Nelson, K. (ed.), Children's language, Vol. 2 (pp. 127–214). New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Mintz, T. H. (2003). Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech. Cognition 90, 91–117.Google Scholar
Mintz, T. H., Newport, E. L. & Bever, T. G. (2002). The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children. Cognitive Science 26, 393–424.Google Scholar
Monaghan, P., Chater, N. & Christiansen, M. H. (2005). The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorization. Cognition 96, 143–82.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1995). The dual category problem in the acquisition of action words. In Tomasello, M. & Merriman, W. E. (eds), Beyond names for things: young children's acquisition of verbs (pp. 223–250). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Oshima-Takane, Y., Barner, D., Elsabbagh, M. & Guerriero, A. M. S. (2001). Learning of deverbal nouns. In Almgren, M., Barreña, A., Ezeizabarrena, M-J., Idiazabal, I. & MacWhinney, B. (eds), Research in language acquisition: proceedings of the 8th congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (pp. 1154–1170). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1987). The bootstrapping problem in language acquisition. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 399–442). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: the acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. Online: <http://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
Redington, M., Chater, N. & Finch, S. (1998). Distributional information: a powerful cue for acquiring syntactic categories. Cognitive Science 22, 425–69.Google Scholar
Sereno, J. A. & Jongman, A. (1995). Acoustic correlates of grammatical class. Language and Speech 38, 57–76.Google Scholar
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Turk, A. E. (1996). A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25, 193–247.Google Scholar
Shi, R. & Melançon, A. (2010). Syntactic categorization in French-learning infants. Infancy 15, 517–33.Google Scholar
Shi, R. & Moisan, A. (2008). Prosodic cues to noun and verb categories in infant-directed speech. In Chan, H., Jacob, H. & Kapia, E. (eds), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 450–461). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M. (2007). Beyond babytalk: re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to pre-linguistic infants. Developmental Review 27, 501–32.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., White, K. S., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-old infants. Infancy 12, 1–29.Google Scholar
Sorensen, J. M., Cooper, W. E. & Paccia, J. M. (1978). Speech timing of grammatical categories. Cognition 6, 135–53.Google Scholar
Srinivasan, M. & Barner, D. (2013). The Amelia Bedelia effect: world knowledge and the goal bias in language acquisition. Cognition 128, 431–50.Google Scholar
Yuan, S. & Fisher, C. (2009). “Really? She blicked the baby?” Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science 20, 619–26.Google Scholar