How babies learn to talk, sentence 4

Babies start learning language before birth; newborns prefer their mother's voice and the sounds of the language they heard before they were born.

Who acts: Babies, newborns · What happens: start, learn, prefer, hear, bear · To what, where: language, voice, newborns

This is a sentence of the lesson «How babies learn to talk» of the language course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Babies, newborns), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	Babies	baby	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 start	nsubj
2	start	start	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	learning	learn	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	2 start	xcomp
4	language	language	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 learning	obj
5	before	before	ADP	_	6 birth	case
6	birth	birth	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 language	nmod
7	;	;	PUNCT	_	9 prefer	punct
8	newborns	newborn	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 prefer	nsubj
9	prefer	prefer	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	2 start	parataxis
10	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	11 mother	nmod:poss
11	mother	mother	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 voice	nmod:poss
12	's	's	PART	_	11 mother	case
13	voice	voice	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 prefer	obj
14	and	and	CCONJ	_	16 sounds	cc
15	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	16 sounds	det
16	sounds	sound	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 voice	conj
17	of	of	ADP	_	19 language	case
18	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	19 language	det
19	language	language	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 sounds	nmod
20	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	21 heard	nsubj
21	heard	hear	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	19 language	acl:relcl
22	before	before	SCONJ	_	25 born	mark
23	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	25 born	nsubj:pass
24	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	25 born	aux:pass
25	born	bear	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	21 heard	advcl
26	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 start	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	roles by
1	start	present	Babies			vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality
2	learn	gerund	Babies not said here	language	before birth	vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent language=Topic
3	prefer	present	newborns	Babies's mother's voice and the sounds of the language		vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer voice=Stimulus
4	hear	past	newborns = newborn	the language not said here		vn see-30.1-1-1 «NP V S»: agent=Experiencer language=Stimulus
5	bear	past · passive		newborns = newborn		vn birth-28.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: subject=Patient

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:language:031-how-babies-learn-to-talk.lesson:4.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/31-how-babies-learn-to-talk/4/