Abstract
To efficiently segment fluent speech, infants must discover the predominant phonological form of words in the native language. In English, for example, content words typically begin with a stressed syllable. To discover this regularity, infants need to identify a set of words. We propose that statistical learning plays two roles in this process. First, it provides a cue that allows infants to segment words from fluent speech, even without language-specific phonological knowledge. Second, once infants have identified a set of lexical forms, they can learn from the distribution of acoustic features across those word forms. The current experiments demonstrate both processes are available to 5-month-old infants. This demonstration of sensitivity to statistical structure in speech, weighted more heavily than phonological cues to segmentation at an early age, is consistent with theoretical accounts that claim statistical learning plays a role in helping infants to adapt to the structure of their native language from very early in life.
Highlights
The ability to segment words from fluent speech is taken for granted by adults, but it represents a major accomplishment for infants
If infants segment fluent speech via sensitivity to conditional statistical information, they should show the same pattern of preference in the test phase, regardless of whether they heard the trochaic or iambic language, because the conditional statistical information is identical across these two languages
This developmental timetable is consistent with the hypothesis that sensitivity to conditional statistical information allows infants to discover a set of lexical forms, which in turn allow infants to identify language-specific acoustic cues such as lexical stress
Summary
The ability to segment words from fluent speech is taken for granted by adults, but it represents a major accomplishment for infants. Unlike the white spaces between words on the written page, pauses do not consistently mark word boundaries in fluent speech This is not troublesome for adults, who can identify word boundaries in large part due to their familiarity with the word forms in their native language (e.g., Nazzi et al, 2005; Norris and McQueen, 2008). Two cues have been suggested to play a role in infants’ earliest ability to segment words from fluent speech: conditional statistical information, and information about the prosodic structure of words (Thiessen and Saffran, 2003) These cues are likely to work together in natural languages, but an open developmental question is which is available to infants earlier in development. In this series of experiments, we will examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to conditional structure is available from an earlier age, and that statistical learning helps infants discover the predominant prosodic structure of words in their native language
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