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Fillers as signs of distributional learning*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2008

HELENA TAELMAN ,
GERT DURIEUX  and
STEVEN GILLIS
HELENA TAELMAN*
Affiliation:
CNTS, University of Antwerp
GERT DURIEUX
Affiliation:
CNTS, University of Antwerp
STEVEN GILLIS
Affiliation:
CNTS, University of Antwerp
*
Address for correspondence: Helena Taelman, University of Antwerp, Dept. of Linguistics – CNTS, Prinsstraat 13, B-2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. tel: 0032-3 820.27.89; e-mail: Helena.Taelman@telenet.be
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Abstract

A longitudinal analysis is presented of the fillers of a Dutch-speaking child between 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 7. Our analysis corroborates familiar regularities reported in the literature: most fillers resemble articles in shape and distribution, and are affected by rhythmic and positional constraints. A novel finding is the impact of the lexical environment: particular function words act as ‘anchor’ words that attract occurrences of schwa fillers after them. The child inserts significantly more schwa fillers in these contexts. The anchor words are among the most frequent words preceding articles in the input, indicating a sharp sensitivity to such distributional regularities. Nasal fillers too are affected by distributional learning, but at the phonological level: the child first uses nasals before [h]-initial nouns, and then generalizes this usage to all [h]-initial words. These observations are related to the growing body of evidence for the impact of distributional learning on early language production.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , March 2009 , pp. 323 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

The research reported in this paper was enabled by a postdoctoral research grant of the National Science Foundation – FWO awarded to the first author, and a grant from the Research Council of the University of Antwerp.

References

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