Last week I discussed Kovacs & Mehler (2009), here. I now understand that the participants in the study were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian. Here's an update on the data from the last post and also data for all onsets (not just 3 syllable words):
It looks like there is no reason to believe that Slovenian-speakers would have more experience of ABA structures than Italian speakers. For some reason, the proportions of ABB syllables seem to shrink in comparison to AAB and ABA when taking all onsets into account. However, the distributions over nouns, adjectives and verbs for English, Dutch and German are a lot more even when considering all onsets, suggesting there is not a huge difference in the way different languages indicate syntactic class using syllable structures.
It looks like there is no reason to believe that Slovenian-speakers would have more experience of ABA structures than Italian speakers. For some reason, the proportions of ABB syllables seem to shrink in comparison to AAB and ABA when taking all onsets into account. However, the distributions over nouns, adjectives and verbs for English, Dutch and German are a lot more even when considering all onsets, suggesting there is not a huge difference in the way different languages indicate syntactic class using syllable structures.
Kovacs, A., & Mehler, J. (2009). Flexible Learning of Multiple Speech Structures in Bilingual Infants Science, 325 (5940), 611-612 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173947
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