ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that young infants rely on prosodic cues in speech to bootstrap their way into syntax has received considerable attention in recent discussions of early language development (e.g., Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau, & Wanner, 1988; Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss, & Kennedy, 1987). The appeal of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis is easy to understand. If the boundaries between syntactic constituents in speech were indeed reliably marked by constellations of prosodic features such as pauses, pitch contours, and vowel lengthening, this acoustic punctuation could potentially be useful to the child beginning to learn language. And if this syntax-to-prosody mapping were more distinctive and reliable in infant-directed speech (IDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS), the prosodic structure of IDS could provide even greater support for the infant’s initial efforts at parsing the speech stream. The prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis has captured the imagination of many researchers in the field on the strength of its apparent plausibility and explanatory promise.
