(provided by candidate): Broadly, the proposed research will address how infants begin to take a linear string of words in the speech stream and build a hierarchically structured syntactic representation. This question is of importance for accounts of human language development and in the design of software for natural language processing. Both of these endeavors are of interest to those in the area of language deficits, either developmental or traumatic. Specifically, the project will examine the respective roles of function words and prosodic information in the early development of syntax in infants. The investigation will focus on the use of function words in other domains of language acquisition, the interaction between prosody and function words in infants' representation of sentences, and the development of functional syntactic categories. The approach will integrate behavioral and computational methods. Two measures of infant perceptual attention, the Headturn Preference Procedure, and the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm will be used to assess infants' sensitivity to specific cues (prosody and the location of function words) to syntax in various contexts. This behavioral work will be supplemented with connectionist models to compare the relative benefits of different aspects of the speech input in developing syntactic knowledge.
| Soderstrom, Melanie; Blossom, Megan; Foygel, Rina et al. (2008) Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants. J Child Lang 35:869-902 |
| Soderstrom, Melanie; Morgan, James L (2007) Twenty-two-month-olds discriminate fluent from disfluent adult-directed speech. Dev Sci 10:641-53 |
