Perception of acoustic correlates of major phrasal units by young infants

How might young learners parse speech into linguistically relevant units? Sensitivity to prosodic markers of these segments is one possibility. Seven experiments examined infants' sensitivity to acoustic correlates of phrasal units in English. The results suggest that: (a) 9 month olds, but not...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive psychology 1992-04, Vol.24 (2), p.252-293
Main Authors: Jusczyk, Peter W, Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, Kemler Nelson, Deborah G, Kennedy, Lori J, Woodward, Amanda, Piwoz, Julie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Correlates
Age Differences
Attention
Auditory Perception
Babies
Biological and medical sciences
Child Development
Child Language
College Students
Communication disorders
Developmental psychology
English
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Higher Education
Humans
Infant
Infants
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Linguistics
Male
Parsing
Perceptions
Phonetics
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Segmentation Skills
Social research
Sound Spectrography
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Speech Perception
Verbal Stimuli
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Summary:How might young learners parse speech into linguistically relevant units? Sensitivity to prosodic markers of these segments is one possibility. Seven experiments examined infants' sensitivity to acoustic correlates of phrasal units in English. The results suggest that: (a) 9 month olds, but not 6 month olds, are attuned to cues that differentially mark speech that is artificially segmented at linguistically COINCIDENT as opposed to NONCOINCIDENT boundaries (Experiments 1 and 2); (b) the pattern holds across both subject phrases and predicate phrases and across samples of both Child- and Adult-directed speech (Experiments 3, 4, and 7); and (c) both 9 month olds and adults show the sensitivity even when most phonetic information is removed by low-pass filtering (Experiments 5 and 6). Acoustic analyses suggest that pitch changes and in some cases durational changes are potential cues that infants might be using to make their discriminations. These findings are discussed with respect to their implications for theories of language acquisition.
ISSN:0010-0285
1095-5623
DOI:10.1016/0010-0285(92)90009-Q