Is prosodic information alone sufficient for guiding early grammatical acquisition?

An infant perceptual experiment investigated the role of prosody. All-nonsense-word sentences (e.g., Guin felli crale vur ti gosine), each in structure 1 ([[Determiner + Adjective + Noun] [Verb + Determiner + Noun]]) and structure 2 ([[Determiner + Noun] [Verb + Preposition + Determiner + Noun]]), were recorded (by mimicking real-word French sentences) with disambiguating prosodic groupings matching the two major constituents. French-learning 20- and 24-month-olds were familiarized with either structure 1 or structure 2. All infants were tested with noun-use trials (e.g., Le crale “the crale-Noun”) versus verb-use trials (Tu crales “You crale-Verb”). Structure-2-familiarized infants, but not structure-1-familiarized infants, discriminated the test trials, demonstrating that prosody alone guides verb categorization. Noun categorization requires determiners, as shown in earlier work [S. Massicotte-Laforge and R. Shi, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 138(4), EL441–EL446 (2015)].