Prosody and syntactic structures in continuous speech in French
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infant-directed speech contains dominantly multi-word utterances. Segmenting speech into linguistic units is crucial for language acquisition. This study inquires if prosodic cues exist in speech and mark syntactic categories. Participants were Quebec-French speakers. In experiment 1 participants read determiner+noun and pronoun+verb utterances. Nouns and verbs were pseudo-words (e.g., mige, crale) counterbalanced in their occurrences in the utterances, and their prosodic properties (duration, pitch, intensity) were measured. Results showed that the two types of utterances did not differ in prosody; noun versus verb productions of these pseudo-words were equivalent prosodically. Experiment 2 tested whether larger utterances were produced with prosodic cues supporting syntactic units. The same pseudo-words were the final words (counterbalanced) in (1) [determiner+adjective+noun] and (2) [[determiner+noun]+verb] structures. Results showed that the last word as nouns versus verbs differed significantly in duration, pitch and intensity. Moreover, the initial consonant of verb productions was longer, with a distinct preceding pause. The word preceding the verb (2) exhibited boundary cues, differing significantly from the word preceding the noun in (1) in duration, pitch, and intensity. We suggest that these acoustic cues may help children first parse larger utterances and then acquire the syntactic properties of phrases and words based on their distribution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".