system. Rather children use prosodic information to split clauses into syntactic phrases (e.g., [The [is For example, the end of a phrase is often signalled by final syllable boy] running]). lengthening, a falling pitch contour and/or a short pause. Having split the clause into syntactic phrases, the child then uses to label each phrase, and hence to assign the items to the ‘flags’ relevant categories. For example, in this case, the child uses determiner and auxiliary to the is label the phrases as NOUN PHRASE and VERB PHRASE respectively, and hence to assign boy to the NOUN class and to the VERB class. The advantage of the prosodic bootstrapping running account is that, by using non-distributional (i.e., prosodic) information to break into the distributionally-defined system, it avoids both circularity, and the problem of linking distributional clusters to UG-specified categories. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that even 6-month-old infants are sensitive to the relevant prosodic properties. Using a paradigm, Soderstrom, Seidl, Kemler Nelson and Jusczyk (2003) showed that infants could discriminate between two strings that were identical in terms of their phonemes, but only one of which contained an NP/VP boundary, marked by final syllable lengthening and pitch drop: At the discount store are simple... No phrase boundary: new watches for men NP/VP boundary: In the field, the old frightened gnu // watches for men and women... One problem facing this account is that, even looking only at the case of the NP/VP boundary in a single language (i.e., English), such a strategy would probably lead to incorrect segmentation in the majority of cases. For sentences with unstressed pronoun subjects (e.g., He kissed the dog) as opposed to full NPs (e.g., prosodic cues place the NP/VP boundary in The boy kissed the dog), the wrong place (e.g., *[NP [VP Gerken, Jusczyk & Mandel, 1994; Nespor He kissed] The dog]; & Vogel, 1986). In an analysis of spontaneous speech to a child aged 1;0, Fisher and Tokura
system. Rather children use prosodic information to split clauses into syntactic phrases (e.g., [The boy] [is running]). For example, the end of a phrase is often signalled by final syllable lengthening, a falling pitch contour and/or a short pause. Having split the clause into syntactic phrases, the child then uses ‘flags’ to label each phrase, and hence to assign the items to the relevant categories. For example, in this case, the child uses determiner the and auxiliary is to label the phrases as NOUN PHRASE and VERB PHRASE respectively, and hence to assign boy to the NOUN class and running to the VERB class. The advantage of the prosodic bootstrapping account is that, by using non-distributional (i.e., prosodic) information to break into the distributionally-defined system, it avoids both circularity, and the problem of linking distributional clusters to UG-specified categories. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that even 6-month-old infants are sensitive to the relevant prosodic properties. Using a paradigm, Soderstrom, Seidl, Kemler Nelson and Jusczyk (2003) showed that infants could discriminate between two strings that were identical in terms of their phonemes, but only one of which contained an NP/VP boundary, marked by final syllable lengthening and pitch drop: No phrase boundary: At the discount store new watches for men are simple... NP/VP boundary: In the field, the old frightened gnu // watches for men and women... One problem facing this account is that, even looking only at the case of the NP/VP boundary in a single language (i.e., English), such a strategy would probably lead to incorrect segmentation in the majority of cases. For sentences with unstressed pronoun subjects (e.g., He kissed the dog) as opposed to full NPs (e.g., The boy kissed the dog), prosodic cues place the NP/VP boundary in the wrong place (e.g., *[NP He kissed] [VP The dog]; Gerken, Jusczyk & Mandel, 1994; Nespor & Vogel, 1986). In an analysis of spontaneous speech to a child aged 1;0, Fisher and Tokura