Beyond Categories: Infant Syntax Above the Word Level

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Early in childhood, language learners develop a cognitive system that allows them to combine a finite number of forms in their language in order to express an infinite number of meanings: this is syntax. Recent work has introduced behavioral methods to study some of the earliest stages of syntactic development in infancy. To date, these studies have primarily focused on how infants use distributional information to form grammatical categories and draw inferences about word meanings. However, this lexical information comprises only a portion of the full grammatical system that children need to acquire. This symposium presents a set of papers that examine the successes and failures of new methods for probing infants' syntactic representations above the word level. The first two papers provide evidence from preferential looking and listening methods that infants represent the sentences they hear in a structured format, and represent syntactic dependencies, such as wh-movement and coreference relations, that relate constituents within those structures. The third paper discusses challenges for using these methods to investigate infants' sensitivity to phrasal prosody; this is a potentially useful cue for identifying the constituent structure of sentences early in grammatical development, but appears to be used in variable ways by infants and young children. Together, these papers show that syntax development in infancy goes beyond lexical categorization, and invite further work developing our experimental strategies for studying the representation of syntactic structure and dependencies at very young ages.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Laurel Perkins, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussant

• Jeffrey L Lidz, University of Maryland - College Park

Individual Presentations

• Non-Local Syntactic Dependencies in Infancy: Wh-Question Representations Develop Between 14- and 18-Months - Presenting Author: Laurel Perkins, University of California - Los Angeles; Non-Presenting Author: Jeffrey L Lidz, University of Maryland - College Park

• Hierarchical Structural Knowledge: Evidence from Toddlers’ Understanding of Binding Principles - Presenting Author: Emeryse Emond, L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM); Non-Presenting Author: Rushen Shi, L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

• Cross-Linguistic Evidence for the Role of Phrasal Prosody in Constraining Parsing in Young Children - Presenting Author: Letícia Schiavon Kolberg, Université Paris Cité; Non-Presenting Author: Alex de Carvalho, Université de Paris; Non-Presenting Author: Anne Christophe, École Normale Supérieure