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Learning Theory and Concepts

Prosodic Bootstrapping

Foundational and Developmental Learning Concepts

Prosodic bootstrapping, also known as phonological bootstrapping, is the hypothesis that learners of a first language use prosodic features of speech, such as pitch, tempo, rhythm and amplitude, as a cue for identifying other properties of the language's grammar, such as its syntactic structure. Under this hypothesis, infants draw on the acoustic properties of the speech they hear, including patterns of stress and intonation, to begin discovering the grammatical organization of their native language even before they have acquired full syntactic knowledge of it.

Facts
Core Claim
Prosodic bootstrapping, also known as phonological bootstrapping, is the hypothesis that learners of a first language use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm and amplitude from the speech signal to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. 1
Origin Year
1982 1
Sources
1. Prosodic bootstrapping (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • lead paragraph
    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.
  • Argument for section
    The argument for prosodic bootstrapping was first introduced by Gleitman and Wanner (1982), who observed that infants might use prosodic cues
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