British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli

Abstract

The word segmentation paradigm originally designed by Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) has been widely used to examine how infants from the age of 7.5 months can extract novel words from continuous speech. Here we report a series of 13 studies conducted independently in two British laboratories, showing that British English-learning infants aged 8-10.5 months fail to show evidence of word segmentation when tested in this paradigm. In only one study did we find evidence of word segmentation at 10.5 months, when we used an exaggerated infant-directed speech style. We discuss the impact of variations in infant-directed style within and across languages in the course of language acquisition.

A perceptual advantage for onomatopoeia in early word learning: Evidence from eye-tracking

“…This might explain the low looking in the CW condition in our results. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the literature to show that infants are better able to learn words which stand out from the input owing to prosodic salience or segmentability (Brent & Siskind, 2011;Fernald & Kuhl, 1987;Floccia et al, 2016), and so we cannot overlook the potential effects of input on our results.…”

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory‐Building

“…In addition, while several moderators of the size of infants’ IDS preference have been described (e.g., age), considerable variance remains unexplained. Most notably, although the presence of IDS is a cross‐linguistic phenomenon (see Soderstrom, , for review), there is variation across languages, and North American English (NAE) appears to provide an especially exaggerated form (Fernald et al., ; Floccia et al., ; Kitamura, Thanavishuth, Burnham, & Luksaneeyanawin, ; Shute & Wheldall, ; although cf. Farran, Lee, Yoo, & Oller, ).…”

Cascading and Multisensory Influences on Speech Perception Development

“…Contingent communicative interactions also impact the nature of young infants' babbles (Goldstein, King, & West, 2003;Goldstein & Schwade, 2008). Similarly, responsive maternal-infant speech interaction style facilitates infants' ability to pull out and recognize words in continuous speech (Bosseler, Teinonen, Tervaniemi, & Huotilainen, 2016;Floccia et al, 2016;Thiessen, Hill, & Saffran, 2005), skills that predict later vocabulary size (Junge, Kooijman, Hagoort, & Cutler, 2012;Marchman & Fernald, 2008;Newman, Rowe, & Ratner, 2016;Singh, Reznick, & Xuehua, 2012). Thus, speech perception development in the first year of life has a direct influence on later vocabulary (but see Cristia, Seidl, Junge, Soderstrom, & Hagoort, 2014).…”