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Phonological and Prosodic Bootstrapping 447 Phonological and Prosodic Bootstrapping 447 than do French and English. Unfortunately, phoneme Phonological and Prosodic discrimination studies with bilingual infants are not abundant, especially those including sensitive meth- Bootstrapping ods such as tracking eye movements or measuring brain responses. Research is yet to demonstrate the Around their first birthday, most infants start pro- full extent of the differences and similarities in how ducing words. However, it is typically not until chil- phoneme discrimination develops in bilingual versus dren have acquired some 50 words in their produc- monolingual children. tive vocabulary that they start combining words into utterances. Early theories of syntactic development— Paola Escudero based primarily on corpus work—were consequently University of Western Sydney developed to account for children’s early (syntacti- cally deprived) utterances. By contrast, more recent See Also: Bilingual Language Development; Bilingualism: work has started to focus on children’s comprehen- Interactions Between Languages; Early Second Language sion of grammatical structures at ages that precede Acquisition; Early Word Learning; Electrophysiology productive evidence of syntactic development. Such Methods in Language Development; Phonological work has suggested that, within their first two to three Development; Speech Perception and Categorization; years of life, infants gain sensitivity to many aspects of Statistical Learning. the syntactic structure of their native language. This sensitivity is thus in place even before children have Further Readings acquired a rich vocabulary that may help them tune Escudero, P. “Speech Processing in Bilingual and into the complexities of the ambient language. Multilingual Listeners.” In The Handbook of Laboratory The relatively early sensitivity to grammati- Phonology, A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, and M. K. cal structure has raised the question of what cues Huffman, eds. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, enable young, preverbal children to acquire grammar. 2011. According to one account, prosodic information, and Escudero, P., T. Benders, and K. Wanrooij. “Enhanced phonological cues more broadly, immediately per- Bimodal Distributions Facilitate the Learning of ceivable from the speech signal, may be the key ingre- Second Language Vowels.” Journal of the Acoustical dient providing infants’ initial bootstrap into the lan- Society of America, v.130 (2011). guage. The central tenet of this hypothesis, typically Kuhl, P. K., K. A. Williams, F. Lacerda, K. N. Stevens, and referred to as the phonological bootstrapping hypoth- B. Lindblom. “Linguistic Experience Alters Phonetic esis, or bootstrapping from the signal, is based on the Perception in Infants by 6 Months of Age.” Science, idea that crude structural properties of syntax are sig- v.255 (1992). naled by their phonological correlates. That is, chil- Maye, J., J. F. Werker, and L. A. Gerken. “Infant Sensitivity dren can learn certain aspects of the structure of their to Distributional Information Can Affect Phonetic language through an analysis of the surface form of Discrimination.” Cognition, v.82 (2002). the incoming speech signal. Because this approach to Polka, L. and J. F. Werker. “Developmental Changes in bootstrapping into one’s native language requires no Perception of Nonnative Vowel Contrasts.” Journal prior linguistic knowledge, it can potentially explain of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and the earliest steps of language acquisition. Performance, v.20 (1994). The notion that prosodic information in the Rivera-Gaxiola, M., J. Silva-Pereyra, and P. K. Kuhl. speech stream contains cues to syntactic structure “Brain Potentials to Native and Non-Native Speech was first introduced in the 1980s by researchers such Contrasts in 7- and 11-Month-Old American Infants.” as Lila Gleitman, James Morgan, Elissa Newport, Developmental Science, v.8 (2005). Ann Peters, and Eric Warren and forms the basis of Werker, J. “Perceptual Foundations of Bilingual the current phonological bootstrapping hypothesis. Acquisition in Infancy.” Annals of the New York Originally called the prosodic bootstrapping hypoth- © Brooks, Patricia J.; Kempe, Vera, Apr 22, 2014, Encyclopedia of Language Development SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, ISBN: 9781483346434 Academy of Sciences, v.1251 (2012). esis, a term introduced by Steven Pinker, the hypoth- Werker, J. F., K. Corcoran, C. T. Fennell, and C. L. Stager. esis mainly focused on infants’ use of prosody (i.e., “Infants’ Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: information such as pitch modulation and rhythmic Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size.” Infancy, v.3 (2002). variation) to bootstrap into the structural properties 448 Phonological and Prosodic Bootstrapping of the language. Later accounts also have started prosodic cues correctly identify clause boundaries to incorporate nonprosodic information available approximately 88 percent of the time. from the speech signal, such as phonetic and phono- Of course, a correlation between the prosodic tactic cues. To integrate this broader view, Morgan information and syntactic structure does not imply and Katherine Demuth referred to the phonological that the two are perfectly aligned. Perhaps one of bootstrapping hypothesis, which is currently the most the most frequently raised criticisms of the prosodic commonly used term. bootstrapping hypothesis concerns the caveat that The idea that a purely perceptual analysis of the there is no one-to-one correspondence between pro- speech signal may reveal grammatical structure rests sodic and syntactic phrases. For example, although on a few critical assumptions: that (1) structural prosodic boundaries typically correspond to syn- properties of sentences are reliably correlated with tactic boundaries, the reverse is not necessarily the prosodic or phonetic features; (2) infants are sensitive case. More specifically, while clause boundaries are to the acoustic correlates of these prosodic features; fairly reliably associated with prosodic cues in child- and (3) infants are able to rely on these acoustic cor- directed speech, intermediate phrasal structure has relates of prosodic features during speech perception much weaker prosodic prominence. A sentence such early in life. We here address each of these assump- as He is eating, for instance, is encapsulated in a single tions and discuss the plausibility of the phonological prosodic unit even though the pronoun is a clear syn- bootstrapping hypothesis in more detail. tactic constituent on its own, leaving the major syn- tactic boundary separating the subject from the verb Relationship Between Phonology and Syntax phrase prosodically unmarked. This suggests that not In order for phonology to cue syntax, prosodic and all syntactic boundaries may be learnable from the syntactic phrases need to reliably coincide, and phonological structure. Nonetheless, the phonologi- phrasal prosody should provide language learn- cal information can provide children with the first ers with cues that help them divide sentences into step to decode the signal and can, as such, be used rudimentary prosodic–syntactic units. Prosodic as a first proxy to syntactic analyses. That is, even if units should furthermore be organized hierarchi- some syntactic boundaries will have no clear prosodic cally according to the depth of their acoustic mark- marker, and will hence not be recovered on first pass, ers. Evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. a phonological analysis of the speech signal would Specifically, phonological words are grouped into provide learners with at least some reliable cues that phonological phrases, which in turn constitute into- may guide their early syntactic analysis of sentences. national phrases. Generally speaking, each of these Once bootstrapped, such initial syntactic informa- levels correlates with syntactic levels of utterances, tion can subsequently be used to analyze the input in such that the prosodic structure might provide a a more fine-grained fashion. natural bracketing of speech into syntactically rel- Prosodic phrase boundaries are not the only source evant phrases and clauses. For example, intonational of information infants could access in the speech sig- phrases—corresponding to clauses or propositions nal to cue the syntactic structure. Within phonologi- within a sentence—tend to be universally marked by cal phrases, the position of prosodic prominence is phonological cues such as phrase-initial strengthen- correlated with word order and could thus provide a ing, phrase-final lengthening, pitch declination, and perceptually available surface cue to the typology of pauses. Phonological phrases—intermediate pro- the language. For example, prosodic prominence is sodic phrases, corresponding to syntactic phrases phrase initial in languages where the object follows typically consisting of a few function and content the verb (e.g., [they] rideV bikesO) and the noun fol- words—are indicated by similar, but reduced, acous- lows the preposition (e.g., inP storesN), such as Eng- tic correlates. Although the exact set of prosodic lish or French, and is marked by a pitch accent on cues that serve to delimit clauses and phrases differs the initial word. By contrast, prosodic prominence is across languages, a reliable correspondence between phrase final in languages where the object precedes © Brooks, Patricia J.; Kempe, Vera, Apr 22, 2014, Encyclopedia of Language Development SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, ISBN: 9781483346434
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