The Beginnings of Word Segmentation in English-Learning Infants

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

“…They found that 9-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, attended significantly longer to lists of words that followed the predominant stress pattern of English words-strong/weak. In a subsequent study, Jusczyk, Houston, and Newsome [28] discovered that 7.5-month-old English-learning infants were able to segment strong/weak words from fluent speech but not weak/strong (also see [27]). Taken together, both sets of findings suggest that English-learning infants' sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of words in their language plays an important role in their ability to segment words from fluent speech.…”

“…Over the past 10 years, developmental scientists have investigated the problem of segmentation in NH infants and the role of various types of linguistic cues to segmentation such as rhythmic [27,28], statistical/distributional [29][30][31], coarticulatory [32], phonotactic [33,34], and allophonic [35]. Some of these cues, such as statistical/distributional and coarticulatory information may be similar across languages, while others vary substantially from language to language.…”

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants

“…Moreover, although English-learning 9-month-olds do not use allophonic cues to segment items such as nitrates and night rates from fluent speech contexts, English-learning 10.5-month-olds do (Jusczyk, Hohne, & Bauman, 1999a). Interestingly, at the latter age, when infants display sensitivity to both allophonic and phonotactic cues to word boundaries, they also show some ability to segment weak/strong words from fluent speech (Jusczyk et al, 1999b;Myers et al, 1996). Therefore, the evidence suggests that infantsÕ abilities to use different types of word segmentation cues that are available in the acoustic signal develop considerably between 7.5 and 10.5 months of age.…”

“…Moreover, infantsÕ ability to segment target words did not depend upon their prior knowledge of those words. In addition, infantsÕ word segmentation abilities at this age allow them to extract not only monosyllabic words (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995), but also bisyllabic (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999b), and even trisyllabic words (Santelman, Houston, & Jusczyk, 1997). Finally, 7.5-month-olds even display some ability to segment words under noisy conditions, such as when interference from a competing voice is present (Newman & Jusczyk, 1996).…”

“…Jusczyk et al (1999b) investigated whether the preference that English-learners display for words with the predominant stress pattern might play a role in their segmentation of words in fluent speech. They familiarized 7.5-month-olds with words with strong/ weak stress such as kingdom and doctor, or words with weak/strong stress such as beret and guitar.…”