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Anne Christophe - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
Cognition, 2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate Prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the Prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit Prosodic information to access the syntactic Structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the Prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the Prosodic Structure of sentences to recover their syntactic Structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
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preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
Developmental Science, 2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic Structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate Prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the Prosodic Structure, that reflects the syntactic Structure (with a Prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that Prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited Prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the Prosodic Structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic Structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
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Prosodic Structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head-direction parameter
Developmental Science, 2003Co-Authors: Anne Christophe, Marina Nespor, Maria Teresa Guasti, Brit Van OoyenAbstract:We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of Prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6‐12-week-old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and its Prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish). This result supports the hypothesis that infants may use this kind of Prosodic information to bootstrap their acquisition of word order.
Alex De Carvalho - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
Cognition, 2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate Prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the Prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit Prosodic information to access the syntactic Structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the Prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the Prosodic Structure of sentences to recover their syntactic Structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
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preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
Developmental Science, 2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic Structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate Prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the Prosodic Structure, that reflects the syntactic Structure (with a Prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that Prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited Prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the Prosodic Structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic Structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
Isabelle Dautriche - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
Cognition, 2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate Prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the Prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit Prosodic information to access the syntactic Structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the Prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the Prosodic Structure of sentences to recover their syntactic Structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
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preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
Developmental Science, 2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic Structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate Prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the Prosodic Structure, that reflects the syntactic Structure (with a Prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that Prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited Prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the Prosodic Structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic Structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
Louann Gerken - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Prosodic Structure in young children s language production
Language, 1996Co-Authors: Louann GerkenAbstract:Research in Prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic Structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent Prosodic Structure, which includes Prosodic categories such as metrical foot, Prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Five experiments examined English-speaking two-year-olds' omissions of object articles in different Prosodic Structures. The data indicate that children omit unfooted syllables and that foot boundaries, in turn, are influenced by Prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that children create Prosodic Structures remarkably similar to those proposed in theories of Prosodic phonology.*
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when prosody fails to cue syntactic Structure 9 month olds sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases
Cognition, 1994Co-Authors: Louann Gerken, Peter W Jusczyk, Denise R MandelAbstract:According to Prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and Prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic Structure but rather is governed by independent Prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the Prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which Prosodic Structure is consistent with syntactic Structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which Prosodic Structure does not mirror syntactic Structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP condition, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine if other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the Prosodic Structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the Prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic Structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.
Sinhorng Chen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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modeling of speaking rate influences on mandarin speech prosody and its application to speaking rate controlled tts
IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 2014Co-Authors: Sinhorng Chen, Yihru Wang, Chiaohua Hsieh, Chenyu Chiang, Hsichun Hsiao, Yuanfu Liao, Hsiumin YuAbstract:A new data-driven approach to building a speaking rate-dependent hierarchical Prosodic model (SR-HPM), directly from a large prosody-unlabeled speech database containing utterances of various speaking rates, to describe the influences of speaking rate on Mandarin speech prosody is proposed. It is an extended version of the existing HPM model which contains 12 sub-models to describe various relationships of Prosodic-acoustic features of speech signal, linguistic features of the associated text, and Prosodic tags representing the Prosodic Structure of speech. Two main modifications are suggested. One is designing proper normalization functions from the statistics of the whole database to compensate the influences of speaking rate on all Prosodic-acoustic features. Another is modifying the HPM training to let its parameters be speaking-rate dependent. Experimental results on a large Mandarin read speech corpus showed that the parameters of the SR-HPM together with these feature normalization functions interpreted the effects of speaking rate on Mandarin speech prosody very well. An application of the SR-HPM to design and implement a speaking rate-controlled Mandarin TTS system is demonstrated. The system can generate natural synthetic speech for any given speaking rate in a wide range of 3.4-6.8 syllables/sec. Two subjective tests, MOS and preference test, were conducted to compare the proposed system with the popular HTS system. The MOS scores of the proposed system were in the range of 3.58-3.83 for eight different speaking rates, while they were in 3.09-3.43 for HTS. Besides, the proposed system had higher preference scores (49.8%-79.6%) than those (9.8%-30.7%) of HTS. This confirmed the effectiveness of the speaking rate control method of the proposed TTS system.
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an rnn based Prosodic information synthesizer for mandarin text to speech
IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 1998Co-Authors: Sinhorng Chen, Shawhwa Hwang, Yihru WangAbstract:A new RNN-based Prosodic information synthesizer for Mandarin Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) is proposed in this paper. Its four-layer recurrent neural network (RNN) generates Prosodic information such as syllable pitch contours, syllable energy levels, syllable initial and final durations, as well as intersyllable pause durations. The input layer and first hidden layer operate with a word-synchronized clock to represent current-word phonologic states within the Prosodic Structure of text to be synthesized. The second hidden layer and output layer operate on a syllable-synchronized clock and use outputs from the preceding layers, along with additional syllable-level inputs fed directly to the second hidden layer, to generate desired Prosodic parameters. The RNN was trained on a large set of actual utterances accompanied by associated texts, and can automatically learn many human-prosody phonologic rules, including the well-known Sandhi Tone 3 F0-change rule. Experimental results show that all synthesized Prosodic parameter sequences matched quite well with their original counterparts, and a pitch-synchronous-overlap-add-based (PSOLA-based) Mandarin TTS system was also used for testing of our approach. While subjective tests are difficult to perform and remain to be done in the future, we have carried out informal listening tests by a significant number of native Chinese speakers and the results confirmed that all synthesized speech sounded quite natural.
