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Prosodic bootstrapping


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.

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.


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