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Grammatical and caregiver cues in early sentence comprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1999

MICHELE SHADY  and
LOUANN GERKEN
MICHELE SHADY
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Geneseo
LOUANN GERKEN
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Abstract

In order to begin to learn a language, young children must be able to locate and distinguish linguistic units in the speech they hear. A number of cues in the speech stream may aid them in this task. Some cues, such as frequently occurring grammatical morphemes and prosodic changes at linguistic boundaries are inherent in the language. Other cues, such as short utterance length and placement of key words in utterance-final position, are not integral to the grammar of the language but are characteristically provided by caregivers. Although previous studies suggest that even infants are sensitive to many of these cues, it is not clear that young listeners actually use them in assigning structure to sentences. The experiments reported here asked whether 60 children aged 2;0 to 2;2 used grammatical and caregiver cues in sentence comprehension and how different types of cues interacted. Two findings are of note: children used all of the cues tested, and the presence of one type of cue did not diminish use of another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 163 - 175
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors thank Peter Jusczyk, for comments on previous drafts and the parents and children who participated in the research. This research was supported by the NSF grant number SBR9411185 to LAG.