Dynamic System Theory: Reinterpreting “Prosodic Bootstrapping” and Its Role in Language Acquisition

Evidence from psychology, linguistics, and computational linguistics all points to the same conclusion: Prosody does not map transparently onto syntax (see Dresher, this volume; Fisher & Tokura, this volume; Venditti, Jun, & Beckman, this volume). It follows, therefore, that analyses of prosody cannot provide total access to linguistic structure. Children will have to integrate information from a number of input sources to induce the grammar of their native language.