More crosslinguistic evidence on fillers in the late single-word period

Abstract

Peters' Note highlights the tight interconnection between phonological advances and the child's discovery of morphosyntactic structure. Taking a constructivist view, or assuming no advance knowledge of what linguistic principles or parameters may be expected, investigators like Peters & Menn (1993) or Veneziano & Sinclair (in press) come to the conclusion that children must begin with the surface regularities of language, only gradually familiarizing themselves deeply enough, through use, with the make-up (as well as the situational cooccurrences) of commonly heard words and larger lexical patterns or constructions to begin to develop multi-level linguistic knowledge, i.e., to discover morphosyntax. In commenting on Peters' stimulating note on filler syllables we would like to draw on our cross-linguistic data for the late single word period to attempt to derive some further hints as to the difference input prosody may make and the kinds of transitional phenomena one may find.