Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Boundary alignment enables 11-month-olds to segment vowel initial words from speech |
| Author: | Amanda Seidl |
| Institution: | Purdue University |
| Author: | Elizabeth K. Johnson |
| Institution: | University of Toronto |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Morphology; Phonology; Psycholinguistics |
| Subject Language: |
English
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| Abstract: | Past research has indicated that English-learning infants begin segmenting words from speech by 7·5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). More recent work has demonstrated, however, that 7·5-month-olds' segmentation abilities are severely limited. For example, the ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech reportedly does not appear until 13·5 to 16 months of age (Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001; Nazzi, Dilley, Jusczyk, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Jusczyk, 2005). In this paper, we report on three experiments using the Headturn Preference procedure that investigate both phonetic and phonological factors influencing 11-month-olds' segmentation of vowel-initial words from speech. We replicate earlier findings suggesting that infants have difficulty segmenting vowel-initial words from speech. In addition we extend these findings by demonstrating that under certain conditions, infants are capable of segmenting vowel-initial words from speech at a much younger age than earlier studies have reported. Our findings suggest that infants' ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech is tightly constrained by acoustic-phonetic factors such as pitch movement at the onset of vowel-initial words and segmental strengthening. These experiments underscore the complexity of early word segmentation, and highlight the importance of including contextual factors in developmental models of word segmentation. |
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This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 35, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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