@misc{HoehleWeissenbornKieferetal.2004,
  author    = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen and Kiefer, Dorothea and Schulz, Antje and Schmitz, Michaela},
  title     = {Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16285},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{HoehleSchmitzMuelleretal.2006,
  author    = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schmitz, Michaela and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen},
  title     = {The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on children's early processing capacities},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16297},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann \& Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child's capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children's recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.},
  language  = {en}
}