Functional Elements in Infants’ Speech Processing:
The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements
Barbara Höhle
Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Jürgen Weissenborn
Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt University
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Dorothea Kiefer, Antje Schulz, and Michaela Schmitz
Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam,
Potsdam, Germany
How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this
article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether
German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional
knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede
verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from
the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds
cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize
a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect
was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand
this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis
showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between
determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in
German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category
of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the
capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for
the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition
of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and
the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation
for the novel word.
