Bootstrapping word order• Head-Complement parameter:– head-initial (English, French, Italian,…)• VO• prepositions• complementizers before subordinate clause– head-final (Japanese, Turkish, Bengali…)• OV• postpositions• complementizers after subordinate clauseBootstrapping word orderItalian (head-initial): Japanese (head-final):mangia una mela ringo-wo taberueat an apple apple eatacc‘(s/he) eats an apple’ ‘(s/he) eats an apple’sul tavolo Tokyo karaon.the table Tokyo from‘on the table’ ‘from Tokyo’Bootstrapping word order• A prelexical cue to word order: relative order of function and content words atutterance boundaries– head-initial: function word – content word– head-final: content word – function wordFrequency as a Cuefunctor-final functor-initial1009080706050403020100Japanese Italian% of multiword utterancesExperiment• Artificial language-learning experiment– 8-month-old Japanese and Italian infants• ‘Language’– two content word classes (‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’)• X = {/ru/, /pe/, /du/, /ba/, /fo/, /de/, /ba/, /ra/, /to/}• Y = {/mu/, /ri/, /ko/, /bo/, /bi/, /do/, /ka/, /na/, /ro/}– two function words, one ‘nominal’, one ‘verbal’• A = {fi}• B = {ge}MaterialFamiliarization…AXBYAXBYAXBYA…[3 min 53 s]…gefofibugedefikogepafimoge…Test[8 items]fifogebi bagebofifirugemu kafipagegedofide kufidugegerifipe ragenafiResultsGervain, Nespor, Mazuka, Horie & Mehler (2008)Syntactic knowledge in ...
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