The Distribution and Prosodic Realization of Verb Forms in German Infant-Directed Speech

Abstract

Infant-directed speech is often seen as a predictor for infants' speech processing abilities, for instance speech segmentation or word learning. In this paper, we examine the syntactic distribution (position), accentuation and prosodic phrasing of German verb forms and discuss that many verb forms are prime candidates for early segmentation: they frequently appear at the start or end of prosodic phrases; if they are not phrase-initial, they are often preceded by closed-class word forms and they are frequently accented (imperative verb forms: 72% of the cases, infinitive verb forms: 82% of the cases). It thus appears that German infants ought to be able to extract verbs as early as nouns, given appropriate stimulus materials.

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