Séminaire : Leticia SCHIAVON KOLBERG

Phrasal prosody has been proposed to be a crucial cue to constrain syntactic analysis in both children and adults. However, there are still few studies on young children’s ability to use prosody to constrain parsing. While some provide positive evidence for it in some languages (e.g., in French: Dautriche et al., 2014, de Carvalho et al., 2016a; and in English: Snedeker & Yuan, 2008; de Carvalho et al., 2016b), others failed to observe this ability in children up to 5 years old (e.g. in Korean: Choi & Mazuka, 2003). In the first part of this talk, I will present studies investigating children’s ability to use prosodic boundary information in spoken sentences to constrain their parsing of complex syntactic structures in French and Brazilian Portuguese. In the second part I will present a series of studies investigating the role of prosody in written sentence parsing in children learning to read. Given that phrasal prosody is an important source of information for accessing the syntactic structure of sentences in the spoken domain, it may also help children recover the syntactic constituents of written sentences. However, while there are still few studies investigating the role of prosody in written sentence comprehension in children, several studies suggest that, when silently reading, adults tend to impose an implicit prosodic contour on written sentences, which positively affects their parsing and comprehension (e.g., Pynte & Colonna, 2000; Frazier & Gibson, 2015). In order to investigate when children become able to exploit prosodic information in the written domain, we conducted a reading and picture selection task with French children in the first years of literacy acquisition. The results suggest that 9-year-olds are already able to generate representations of sentence intonation (i.e., prosodic phrasing) when reading sentences aloud, which affect their interpretations of ambiguous sentences. Altogether, the results presented in this talk will show that phrasal prosody may play an important role in oral language acquisition and can also support reading comprehension in children.