Acquisition of linguistic-rhythm and prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (In Japanese; Gengorizumu no kakutoku to inritsu ni yoru bootosutorappingukasetsu"
In the Rhythm-based Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis, it is proposed that infants' early sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of a language will enable them to adopt a metrical speech segmentation strategy appropriate for their language. The proposal was borne out of recent research in infant speech perception which demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to prosodic properties of language that are relevant to linguistic rhythm. Systematic evaluation of the literature revealed that while the acquisition of stress-timed languages appear to fit the prediction of the bootstrapping hypothesis, data from the other languages are not so clear. Japanese data, in particular, is not consistent with the hypothesis. It is argued that the rhythm of a language may be salient for infants in all languages, but how this sensitivity is linked to other aspects of language acquisition may differ for the three rhythm types.
