English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Intonational phrase structure processing at different stages of syntax acquisition: ERP studies in 2-, 3-, and 6-year-old children

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons19831

Männel,  Claudia
Department Neuropsychology, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons19643

Friederici,  Angela D.
Department Neuropsychology, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Männel, C., & Friederici, A. D. (2011). Intonational phrase structure processing at different stages of syntax acquisition: ERP studies in 2-, 3-, and 6-year-old children. Developmental Science, 14(4), 786-798. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01025.x.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0011-52CF-C
Abstract
This study explored the electrophysiology underlying intonational phrase processing at different stages of syntax acquisition. Developmental studies suggest that children’s syntactic skills advance significantly between 2 and 3 years of age. Here, children of three age groups were tested on phrase-level prosodic processing before and after this developmental phase, while their brain activity was recorded. The Closure Positive Shift (CPS), which indexes the perception of intonational phrasing in adults, served as dependent variable. The event-related brain potentials of 3- and 6-year-olds, but not of 21-month-olds, showed a CPS. These results suggest that prosodic phrase processing, as indicated by the CPS, is established only later during children’s development, pointing to a close interaction of prosody and syntax acquisition.