TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, M. A1 - Santelmann, L. M. A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on childrens early processing capacities Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kiefer, D. A1 - Schulz, A. A1 - Weissenborn, E. A1 - Schmitz, M. T1 - Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in syntactic categorization of lexical elements N2 - 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 Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, A. A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, M. A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Focus-to-stress alignment in 4- to 5-year-old German-learning children Y1 - 2006 SN - 1847180280 ER -