@article{GonzalezGomezSchmandtFazekasetal.2018,
  author    = {Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli and Schmandt, Silvana and Fazekas, Judit and Nazzi, Thierry and Gervain, Judit},
  title     = {Infants' sensitivity to nonadjacent vowel dependencies},
  series = {Journal of experimental child psychology},
  volume    = {178},
  journal   = {Journal of experimental child psychology},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0022-0965},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jecp.2018.08.014},
  pages     = {170 -- 183},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Vowel harmony is a linguistic phenomenon whereby vowels within a word share one or several of their phonological features, constituting a nonadjacent, and thus challenging, dependency to learn. It can be found in a large number of agglutinating languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and it may apply both at the lexical level (i.e., within word stems) and at the morphological level (i.e., between stems and their affixes). Thus, it might affect both lexical and morphological development in infants whose native language has vowel harmony. The current study asked at what age infants learning an irregular harmonic language, Hungarian, become sensitive to vowel harmony within word stems. In a head-turn preference study, 13-month-old, but not 10-month-old, Hungarian-learning infants preferred listening to nonharmonic VCV (vowel-consonant-vowel) pseudowords over vowel harmonic ones. A control experiment with 13-month-olds exposed to French, a nonharmonic language, showed no listening preference for either of the sequences, suggesting that this finding cannot be explained by a universal preference for nonharmonic sequences but rather reflects language-specific knowledge emerging between 10 and 13 months of age. We discuss the implications of this finding for morphological and lexical learning. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier Inc.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SzendroiBernardBergeretal.2017,
  author    = {Szendroi, Kriszta and Bernard, Carline and Berger, Frauke and Gervain, Judit and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds},
  series = {Journal of child language},
  volume    = {45},
  journal   = {Journal of child language},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Cambridge Univ. Press},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0305-0009},
  doi       = {10.1017/S0305000917000071},
  pages     = {219 -- 241},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.},
  language  = {en}
}