In order to begin to learn a language, young children must be able
to
locate and distinguish linguistic units in the speech they hear. A number
of cues in the speech stream may aid them in this task. Some cues, such
as frequently occurring grammatical morphemes and prosodic changes
at linguistic boundaries are inherent in the language. Other cues, such
as
short utterance length and placement of key words in utterance-final
position, are not integral to the grammar of the language but are
characteristically provided by caregivers. Although previous studies
suggest that even infants are sensitive to many of these cues, it is not
clear that young listeners actually use them in assigning structure to
sentences. The experiments reported here asked whether 60 children
aged 2;0 to 2;2 used grammatical and caregiver cues in sentence
comprehension and how different types of cues interacted. Two findings
are of note: children used all of the cues tested, and the presence of
one
type of cue did not diminish use of another.