Prosodic bootstrapping (also known as phonological bootstrapping) in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language, they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language, such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence, indicating the location of phrase boundaries, and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language, mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.
Argument for The argument for prosodic bootstrapping was first introduced by Gleitman and Wanner (1982), who observed that infants might use prosodic cues (particularly acoustic cues) to discover underlying grammatical information about their native language. These cues (e.g. intonation contour in a question phrase, lengthening a final segment) could aid infants in dividing the speech input into different lexical units, and furthermore aid in placing these units into syntactic phrases appropriate to the language. Prosodic bootstrapping may also provide an explanation to the problem as to how infants segment continuous input. Just like adult speakers, children are exposed to continuous speech. Hearing continuous speech poses a problem for children learning their native language because pauses in speech do not align with word boundaries. As a result, children have to construct word representations from the speech that they hear. A study conducted by Christophe et al. (1994) showed that infants, aging three-days old, are sensitive to acoustic properties of a language. It was shown that three-day olds are able to discriminate bisyllabic stimuli with the same segments based on whether they were extracted from within a word or across a word boundary. The duration of the word initial consonant and the word final vowel are the cues for the existence of a word boundary, which infants may use to learn about syntactic structure. Another main support for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis is that the use of prosodic elements to segment parts of speech can occur at a very early age, as early as 3 days, where infants have shown the ability to differentiate languages based on phonological characteristics alone, and the fact that the use of prosodic cues occurs before the use of lexical or syntactic data. This has led to hypothesis of "bootstrapping from the signal"/"prosodic bootstrapping", which has three main elements:
The syntax of language is correlated with acoustic properties. Infants can detect and are sensitive to these acoustic properties. These acoustic properties can be used by infants when processing speech.
Phonological phrases A phonological phrase boundary indicates how the continuous speech stream is broken up into smaller units, which infants use to pick out and more closely identify individual parts of the sentence. A phonological phrase can contain between four and seven syllables, and can be detected by infants, due to the fact that the edges of the phrases are either strengthened or lengthened. Various studies have been done to test if prosody helps with acquisition of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Another acoustic cue that indicates a prosodic boundary is the duration of a pause. These pauses will usually be longer in duration at the edge of a word boundary, when referring to clause boundaries. For example, the two sentences below, while seemingly similar on the surface representation, have different prosodic structure, which correlates to the different syntactic structure ("..." = longer duration of pause in speech):
"The boy met the girl at the teach in" → [The boy]NP ... [met the girl]VP ... [at the teach in]PP "The boy met the girl and the teacher" → [The boy]NP ... [met the girl and the teacher]VP Using different durations of pause, the underlying syntactic structure can be better distinguished by the listener.
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