The edge factor in early word segmentation: utterance-level prosody enables word form extraction by 6-month-olds
Past research has shown that English learners begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age. However, more recent research has begun to show that, in some situations, infants may exhibit rudimentary segmentation capabilities at an earlier age. Here, we report on four perceptual experiments...
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Published in | PloS one Vol. 9; no. 1; p. e83546 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Public Library of Science
08.01.2014
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Past research has shown that English learners begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age. However, more recent research has begun to show that, in some situations, infants may exhibit rudimentary segmentation capabilities at an earlier age. Here, we report on four perceptual experiments and a corpus analysis further investigating the initial emergence of segmentation capabilities. In Experiments 1 and 2, 6-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing target words located either utterance medially or at utterance edges. Only those infants familiarized with passages containing target words aligned with utterance edges exhibited evidence of segmentation. In Experiments 3 and 4, 6-month-olds recognized familiarized words when they were presented in a new acoustically distinct voice (male rather than female), but not when they were presented in a phonologically altered manner (missing the initial segment). Finally, we report corpus analyses examining how often different word types occur at utterance boundaries in different registers. Our findings suggest that edge-aligned words likely play a key role in infants' early segmentation attempts, and also converge with recent reports suggesting that 6-month-olds' have already started building a rudimentary lexicon. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Conceived and designed the experiments: EKJ. Performed the experiments: EKJ MT. Analyzed the data: EKJ MT. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: EKJ AS. Wrote the paper: EKJ AS MT. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 1932-6203 |
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0083546 |