Savita Bernal
Biographic Data
| ID | 5887129 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Savita Bernal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Savita |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernal |
| SIGNATURE | BERNAL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS /CNRS/ DEC-ENS, Paris |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 5 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 5 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences t…
Categorizing words using ‘frequent frames’
Mintz (2003) described a distributional environment called a frame, defined as the co-occurrence of two context words with one intervening target word. Analyses of English child-directed speech showed that words that fell within any frequently occurring frame consistently belonged to the same grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, etc.). In this paper, we first generalize this result to French, a language in which the function word sys…
Two‐year‐olds compute syntactic structure on‐line
Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences. We observed an early left-lateralized brain response when an expected verb was incorrectly replaced b…
Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition
This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …
Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning
Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “it's pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen match…
Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition
This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …
Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning
Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “it's pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen match…
Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition
This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …
Categorizing words using ‘frequent frames’
Mintz (2003) described a distributional environment called a frame, defined as the co-occurrence of two context words with one intervening target word. Analyses of English child-directed speech showed that words that fell within any frequently occurring frame consistently belonged to the same grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, etc.). In this paper, we first generalize this result to French, a language in which the function word sys…
Two‐year‐olds compute syntactic structure on‐line
Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences. We observed an early left-lateralized brain response when an expected verb was incorrectly replaced b…
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences t…
Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Language Development and Disorders (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Natural language processing (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Noun (4 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (4 works) · Verb (3 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (2 works)