Alex de Carvalho, du laboratoire PsyDé de l’Université Paris Cité, interviendra dans le cadre du séminaire du laboratoire MoDyCo le mardi 8 avril 2025. Nous nous retrouverons dans la salle de séminaire 2 du bâtiment Max Weber de 10h à 12h.

[un lien Zoom est mis en place pour suivre l’intervention à distance, le lien est communiqué dans la liste de diffusion du laboratoire et sur demande aux organisatrices]

La présentation sera en français.

Evaluating the role of phrasal prosody in the acquisition of syntax and word meanings

Alex de Carvalho
LaPsyDÉ – Université Paris Cité

Having access to the syntactic structure of sentences helps children to discover the meaning of novel words and learn different aspects of their language. However, since syntax defines the rules that build words into sentences, thereby creating complex meanings, how can babies access the syntactic structure of sentences without first knowing the meanings of the words? Given that the prosodic structure of a sentence correlates with its syntactic structure (e.g., Nespor & Vogel, 1986) and that adult listeners exploit prosodic boundaries in speech to detect syntactic boundaries and constrain their parsing (e.g. Millotte et al., 2008; Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999; Schafer, 1997), many theories suggest that infants might use prosody to bootstrap their way into syntactic acquisition (e.g., Morgan & Demuth, 1995; Christophe et al., 2016). However, previous studies on young children’s ability to use prosody to constrain parsing have reported mixed results, with some providing positive evidence, and others failing to observe this ability in children up to 6-years-old. Since not every syntactic boundary is marked prosodically, it is possible that listeners’ reliance on prosodic information to constrain parsing may be low, in comparison to more reliable cues, such as lexical content. In a first part of this talk, I will present a series of studies in different languages investigating whether the relationship between syntactic and prosodic structure can affect children’s syntactic processing skills and impact their learning. In a second part, I will present another series of studies investigating how children and adults constrain their syntactic analysis when prosodic structure and lexical content provide conflicting information within a sentence. Overall, my results show that even in absence of an extensive vocabulary, infants are able to exploit prosodic cues to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helps them to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore constrain their meanings. In situations where the prosodic structure of the sentences conflict with the information provided by lexical content, both adults and children still show strong sensitivity to prosodic information during sentence processing. These results suggest that prosody is not treated as an inferior or less reliable source of information to be ignored in case of conflict. Taken together, our studies suggest that prosodic information might be extremely useful for young language learners to access some syntactic information through a surface analysis of the speech stream, and to bootstrap their way into language acquisition.