DOES SENTENTIAL PROSODY HELP INFANTS ORGANIZE AND REMEMBER SPEECH INFORMATION

Theories that propose a mapping between prosodic and syntactic structu res require that prosodic units in fluent speech be perceptually salie nt for infants. Although previous studies have demonstrated that infan ts are sensitive to prosodic markers of syntactic units, they do not s how that prosodic information really has an impact on how infants enco de the speech they hear. Two experiments were conducted to examine whe ther infants as young as 2 months old might actually use the prosody a fforded by sentences to organize and remember spoken information. The results suggest that infants better remember the phonetic properties o f (1) words that are prosodically linked together within a single clau se as opposed to individual items in a list (Experiment 1); and (2) wo rds that are prosodically linked within a single clausal unit as oppos ed to spanning two contiguous fragments (Experiment 2). Taken together , the evidence from both experiments suggests that the prosodic organi zation of speech into clausal units enhances infants' memory for spoke n information. These findings are discussed with regard to their impli cations for theories of language acquisition.