Discovering Words

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First, it provides a cue that allows infants to segment words from fluent speech, even without language-specific phonological knowledge.

The goal of Experiment 1A was to provide further behavioral evidence that infants are capable of segmenting fluent speech via conditional statistical information below 6 months.Rather than statistical cues and acoustic cues being in conflict (as they are artificially placed in the iambic familiarization stream), conditional statistical information may actually allow infants to discover the dominant rhythmic patterns of their native language ( Thiessen and Saffran, 2007). This is consistent with the claim that sensitivity to conditional statistical information develops earlier than sensitivity to language-specific prosodic patterns ( Thiessen and Saffran, 2003). This is especially true of the words in infant-directed speech, which appear to exaggerate the regularities present in adult-directed speech (e.

These results indicate that infants show a different preference for test items after listening to the trochaic and iambic languages, as would be expected if they had learned to treat lexical stress as a cue to word segmentation. This cue is relevant to word segmentation because sounds within a word are more likely to co-occur than sounds across word boundaries ( Hayes and Clark, 1970). The books are produced using acid-free paper, processed chlorine free, and printed with soya-based inks. When the observing experimenter pressed a key indicating that the infant had fixated, the monitor displayed a video of a looming green ball on a black background, while the speakers began to play the test item (either word or part-word) separated by 1. Playful and bold, this dynamic series will educate and entertain preschoolers, parents, and teachers alike.Note that in prior experiments, English-learning infants have been able to learn both a trochaic and an iambic bias. As such, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that conditional statistical information is one of the first cues available to infants as they begin to discover word forms in speech. The fact that they successfully segmented raises the possibility that word segmentation may begin at younger ages than previously thought in native language environments. For example, exposure to a set of words allows infants to discover the phonological regularities that characterize those words ( Chambers et al.