Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 62
2002; Newport & Aslin, 2004; Pena, Bonatti, Nespor, & Mehler, 2002). However, these
kinds of distributional relations are almost impossible for learners to acquire, i.e. they
do not learn the dependencies between classes (Braine et al., 1990; P. J. Brooks, Braine,
Catalano, Brody, & Sudhalter, 1993; Frigo & McDonald, 1998). This difficulty is ameliorated,
either when category members are marked with salient conceptual or perceptual
cues (Frigo & McDonald, 1998), or when segmentation cues are introduced. These
can improve the detection of the non-adjacent dependencies (Gomez, 2002) and help to
extract the structural regularities in the stream (Pena et al., 2002). This demonstrates
that humans are not unconstrained learners. Instead, abstraction results only when there
is sufficient evidence to distinguish the categories in question. In fact, many of the categories
found in natural language (such as gender, declension and conjugation classes)
are rich in systematic cues to class membership (e.g., verbs tend to have fewer syllables
than nouns, a cue used even by 4-year-olds, cf. Cassidy & Kelly, 1991).
The acquisition of abstract structure (e.g., phrase boundaries) is, however, often not
obviously and unambiguously mirrored in the surface statistics of the input. There are
particular ubiquitous structures, found cross-linguistically, for which the most learningoriented
theories can not provide a transparent explanation. Thus, it is conceivable that
some nearly universal structural aspects of human languages may result from certain
constraints. Prosodic breaks, function words and concord morphology are effective at
promoting hierarchical packaging of word strings in an artificial grammar when they
occur consistently with the hierarchical structure (Morgan et al., 1987). An even
stronger claim is made by Frazier, Carlson, and Clifton (2006), proposing that prosody
may provide the structure within which utterance comprehension takes place, i.e., it
might supply the basic skeleton that allows humans to hold an auditory sequence in
memory. Gerken, Jusczyk, and Mandel (1994) provide further evidence for the assumption
of prosody helping to step into syntax. They demonstrated that the listening preferences
of 9 month old infants are more in accordance with prosodic, rather than syntactic,
organization. It was demonstrated that statistical cues to phrasal units can be used to
locate phrase boundaries (Saffran, 2001a). The statistical and the prosodic account may
present different sides of the same coin and do not exclude each other, i.e., the segmentation
of phrase boundaries may be especially facilitated when both kinds of cues concur.
The acquisition of syntax was observed to interact with the development of lexical semantics:
Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, and Gleitman (1994) demonstrated that verb acquisition
might be mediated by syntactic constraints. Likewise, Fernald, Perfors and Marchman
(2006) found that the efficiency of spoken language understanding was related to
indices of lexical and grammatical development. Grammatical complexity and vocabu-