The edge factor in early word segmentation: utterance-level prosody enables word form extraction by 6-month-olds.

ABSTRACT: 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 dist

SUBMITTER: Johnson EK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3885442 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature