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Phonological and acoustic bases for earliest grammatical category assignment: a cross-linguistic perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1998

RUSHEN SHI ,
JAMES L. MORGAN  and
PAUL ALLOPENNA
RUSHEN SHI
Affiliation:
Brown University
JAMES L. MORGAN
Affiliation:
Brown University
PAUL ALLOPENNA
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Abstract

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , February 1998 , pp. 169 - 201
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Material in this article formed part of a doctoral dissertation submitted by the first author to the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University. This work was supported in part by NIH grant HD 29426 to J. Morgan. We thank Katherine Demuth and Sheila Blumstein for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article; Robert Brandenberger, John Mertus, and Bin Tang for providing technical and programming support, and Huseyin Tek for Turkish transcriptions.