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

The Distribution and Prosodic Realization of Verb Forms in German Infant-Directed Speech Bettina Braun, Katharina Zahner Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Germany PO Box 186, 78467 Konstanz, Germany E-mail: bettina.braun@uni-konstanz.de, katharina.zahner@uni-konstanz.de 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. Keywords: corpus, infant-directed speech, prosody, verbs, German 1. Introduction Infant-directed speech (henceforth, IDS) is often seen as a predictor for infants' speech processing abilities, for instance speech segmentation or early word learning (e.g., Johnson et al., 2014; Laing, 2017; Laing et al., 2016). Regarding segmentation, infants have been shown to segment nouns from fluent speech earlier than verbs. The ability to extract nouns emerges between 7 and 9 months of age (e.g., Altvater‐Mackensen & Mani, 2013; Bartels et al., 2009; Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995; Jusczyk et al., 1999; Kuijpers et al., 1998; Männel & Friederici, 2013; Schreiner & Mani, 2017; Zahner, Schönhuber, & Braun, 2016). When nouns occur after or before a prosodic boundary, segmentation succeeds even at 6 month of age (Johnson et al., 2014; Seidl & Johnson, 2006). Verbs, on the other hand, are segmented only several months later, by 11 months in French (Marquis & Shi, 2008) or 13.5 months in American English (Nazzi et al., 2005) – this asymmetry is observed even when verbs in the experiments have the same number of syllables and stress patterns as the noun test words. There are two frequent arguments in the literature for why nouns are segmented earlier than verbs (syntactic framing and prosodic marking). In the Introduction, we will evaluate these two arguments for the case of German drawing on German infant studies, where available, and with regard to the grammatical structure of German. Then we derive predictions for the prosodic realization of German verb forms in IDS. In the main part of the paper, we analyze these forms in the KIDS Corpus (Zahner, Schönhuber, Grijzenhout, et al., 2016). Argument 1. Nouns are easier to recognize than verbs, since nouns occur in more restricted syntactic frames than verbs (see Höhle et al., 2004, for German; Willits et al., 2014, for English). For instance, Höhle et al. (2004) analyzed a corpus that comprises recordings of 16 mothers talking to their children aged 18 to 27 months, in total 15.000 words. They reported that indefinite articles were often followed by nouns (70% of the cases), while the personal pronoun sie and a verb co-occurred …

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