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Infants' learning of novel segments is modulated by prosody
Chládková, Kateřina ; Podlipský, V.J. ; Nudga, Natalia ; Paillereau, Nikola ; Kynčlová, Kateřina ; Šimáčková, Š.
Young infants recognize atypical realisations of native-language speech. Later they learn words better from native-accented talkers. However, 6-month-olds preferentially listen to unfamiliar speech. We tested whether the learning of new vowels matches 6-month-olds’ listening preferences, being more effective from nonnative-accented speech. We exposed Czech six-month-olds to delexicalised utterances with consonants replaced by [f] and vowels by 405 tokens sampled from a bimodal [ɛ]-[æ] distribution, a contrast absent from Czech, and with either native or atypical rhythm. Discrimination of [ɛ]-[æ] was then tested in an alternating/non-alternating paradigm. Longer first-look duration to non-alternating than to alternating trials – indicating a learning effect – was found in infants familiarised with the novel contrast in atypical rhythm, such effect was not\ndetected after familiarisation with native rhythm. Six-month-olds thus more effectively exploit distributional information about novel vowels from non-native rhythm, which matches their previously reported preferences for listening to novel over familiar accents.
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Nominal vs adjectival when/where relative clauses
Kynčlová, Kateřina ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The present thesis compares nominal relative clauses and adnominal relative clauses with a general antecedent with the focus on omissibility of the antecedent. General antecedents time, place, thing, or person should be omissible in adjectival relative clauses, which results in a potential alternation of adjectival and nominal relative clauses. Using the data drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC), this thesis examines the hypothesis that it is possible to omit all general locative and temporal antecedents introducing adjectival relative clauses without a significant change in meaning, and tries to identify syntactic or semantic constraints in cases where the omission does not seem viable. Fifty examples of adjectival and fifty examples of nominal relative clauses served as a material for this thesis. It was observed that certain constructions, syntactic functions and syntactic structures disallow the omission of the antecedent regardless of its generality often due to the nature of the fused relatives where and when which do not sufficiently indicate the nominal function of the clause. Furthermore, their locative or temporal nature prevents their occurrence with free and static prepositions whose presence is in such structures redundant. Key words: relative clauses, nominal relative clauses,...
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