There is mounting evidence that prosody facilitates grouping the speech stream into syntactically-relevant units (e.g., Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Soderstrom, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2005). We ask whether prosody's role in syntax acquisition relates to its general acoustic salience or to the learner's acquired knowledge of correlations between prosody and syntax in her native language. English- and Japanese-acquiring 19-month-olds listened to sentences from an artificial grammar with non-native prosody (Japanese or English, respectively), then were tested on their ability to recognize prosodically-marked constituents when the constituents had moved to a new position in the sentence. Both groups were able to use non-native prosody to parse speech into cohesive, reorderable, syntactic constituent-like units. Comparison with Hawthorne & Gerken (2014), in which English-acquiring infants were tested on sentences with English prosody, suggests that 19-month-olds are equally adept at using native and non-native prosody for at least some types of learning tasks and, therefore, that prosody is useful in early syntactic segmentation because of its acoustic salience.

中文翻译：

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韵律的声学显着性胜过婴儿所获得的特定语言韵律模式的知识


越来越多的证据表明，韵律有助于将语音流分组为句法相关的单元（例如，Hawthorne & Gerken，2014；Soderstrom、Kemler Nelson 和 Jusczyk，2005）。我们询问韵律在句法习得中的作用是否与它的一般声学显着性有关，或者与学习者获得的母语韵律和句法之间的相关性知识有关。学习英语和日语的 19 个月大的孩子听了带有非母语韵律（分别是日语或英语）的人工语法中的句子，然后测试了当成分转移到韵律标记的成分时，他们识别这些成分的能力。句子中的新位置。两组都能够使用非母语韵律将语音解析为有凝聚力的、可重新排序的、类似句法成分的单元。 Hawthorne & Gerken (2014) 对习得英语的婴儿进行了英语韵律句子测试，结果表明，19 个月大的婴儿至少在某些类型的学习任务中同样擅长使用母语和非母语韵律，并且因此，韵律由于其声学显着性，在早期句法分割中很有用。