Cross-linguistic evidence for the role of phrasal prosody in syntactic and lexical acquisition

Phrasal prosody is believed to be crucial for syntactic and lexical acquisition, since prosodic boundaries in speech coincide with lexical and syntactic boundaries.However, studies on children's ability to use prosody for parsing have reported mixed results, with some providing positive evidence in French while many studies in other languages failed to observe this ability in children up to 6-years-old.To investigate whether the discrepancies between these studies are due to cross-linguistic or methodological differences, we adapted recent eye-tracking experiments showing that French children successfully use prosody to constrain parsing, to two different languages: English and Brazilian-Portuguese.In English, we used locally ambiguous sentences containing noun-verb homophones that could be disambiguated by prosody.In Brazilian-Portuguese, we tested preschoolers' ability to use prosody to interpret ellipsis (e.g., [The tiger is hitting!][The duck too!]) vs transitive sentences (e.g., [The tiger][is hitting the duck too!]).The results showed that 3-to-5-year-olds in the two languages successfully exploited prosodic structure to constrain their parsing.These studies provide cross-linguistic evidence for the role of phrasal prosody in parsing.