(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.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32)
Project #
1F32HD042927-01
Application #
6551481
Study Section
Biobehavioral and Behavioral Processes 3 (BBBP)
Program Officer
Mccardle, Peggy D
Project Start
2002-09-01
Project End
Budget Start
2002-09-01
Budget End
2003-08-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2002
Total Cost
$36,592
Indirect Cost
Name
Brown University
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
001785542
City
Providence
State
RI
Country
United States
Zip Code
02912
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