Nine-month-olds use frequency of onset clusters to segment novel words

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2016-08, Vol.148, p.131-141
• Main Authors: Archer, Stephanie L., Curtin, Suzanne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Child development; Child Language; Child psychology; Comprehension - physiology; Cues; Female; Frequency; Humans; Infant; Infant speech perception; Language; Language acquisition; Language development; Learning; Male; Native Language; Phonology; Phonotactics; Speech; Speech - physiology; Speech Perception - physiology; Word segmentation; Young Children
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.04.004

•We investigated whether frequency in speech influences infant word segmentation.•Nine-month-olds segmented non-words containing legal complex onsets but not illegal ones.•Nine-month-olds segmented non-words with high frequency onsets but not low frequency ones.•Infants’ sensitivity to frequency of word onsets impacts segmentation. Before their first birthday, infants have started to identify and use information about their native language, such as frequent words, transitional probabilities, and co-occurrence of segments (phonotactics), to identify viable word boundaries. These cues can then be used to segment new words from running speech. We explored whether infants are capable of detecting a novel word form using the frequency of occurrence of the onset alone to further characterize the role of phonotactics in speech segmentation. Experiment 1 shows that English-learning 9-month-olds can successfully segment a word from natural speech if the onset is legal in English (i.e., pleet) but not if the onset is illegal (i.e., tleet). Experiment 2 shows that English-learning 9-month-olds are successful at word segmentation when presented with two onset clusters that vary in statistical frequency. Infants familiarized to a high-frequency onset (i.e., trom) were successful at segmenting the target word embedded in speech, but those familiarized to the low-frequency onset (i.e., drom) were unsuccessful. Together, these results show that infants use statistical information from the speech input and that low levels of exposure to onset phonotactics alone might not be sufficient in identifying word boundaries.