Norms and reading times for acronyms in French.

We collected subjective frequency, age-of-acquisition, and imageability norms for 319 acronyms from French adults. Objective printed frequency, bigram frequency, and lengths in letters, phonemes, and syllables, as well as orthographic neighbors, were computed. The time taken to read acronyms aloud was also recorded.

Individual differences in adult handwritten spelling-to-dictation.

We report an investigation of individual differences in handwriting latencies and number of errors in a spelling-to-dictation task. Eighty adult participants wrote a list of 164 spoken words (presented in two sessions). The participants were also evaluated on a vocabulary test (Deltour, 1993).

Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds.

Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary.

Two-year-olds compute syntactic structure on-line.

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences.

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g.

Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition.

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis.