Word segmentation in a foreign language: Further evidence for crosslinguistic strategies

Abstract

We report further evidence that early word segmentation is triggered by rhythmic properties of the language. Our study used the head turn preference paradigm to compare the skills of English and German 9‐month‐olds to extract bisyllabic trochaic German words from German text passages. Both English and German are stress‐timed languages and have trochaic feet as their dominant stress pattern in bisyllabic words. Consequently, no differences in the segmentation strategies used by infants from these two language groups were expected. In line with our predictions, even though the stimulus material contained phonemes that do not belong to the English phoneme inventory and violations of English phonotactics, English‐learners were as successful in detecting the words as German infants. These findings replicate those of Houston et al. (2000) with Dutch and English. Thus, our findings provide further evidence that children can exploit processing strategies developed in their own language to process another language. Furthermore, the data suggest that, at least initially, word segmentation in infancy relies on acoustical information in a pure bottom‐up fashion without the support of existing knowledge about the language to be processed.