Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-7jgsp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T05:38:27.533Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Boundary alignment enables 11-month-olds to segment vowel initial words from speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2008

AMANDA SEIDL  and
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
AMANDA SEIDL*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, W. Lafayette, Indiana
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Amanda Seidl, Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, 500 Oval Drive, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA. Email: aseidl@purdue.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Aslin, R. N., Woodward, J. Z., LaMendola, N. P. & Bever, T. G. (1996). Models of word segmentation in fluent maternal speech to infants. In Morgan, J. & Demuth, K. (eds), From signal to syntax, 117–34. Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum.Google Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J., Golinkoff, R. & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16(4), 298–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. & Siskind, J. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition, 81, B33–B44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cinque, G. (1993). A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 239–97.Google Scholar
Cooper, W. & Paccia-Cooper, J. (1980). Syntax and speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1986). Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S. & Fenson, L. (1996). Lexical development norms for young children. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 28, 125–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dilley, L., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Ostendorf, M. (1996). Glottalization of vowel-initial syllables as a function of prosodic structure. Journal of Phonetics 24, 423–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J., Bates, E., Thal, D. & Pethick, S. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 242, 59(5).Google ScholarPubMed
Fikkert, P. (1994). On the acquisition of prosodic structure. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Institute of Generative Linguistics.Google Scholar
Fougeron, C. & Keating, P. A. (1997). Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106(6), 3728–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gick, B., Campbell, F., Oh, S. & Tamburri-Watt, L. (2005). Toward universals in the gestural organization of syllables: a cross-linguistic study of liquids. Journal of Phonetics 34, 49–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R. & Alioto, A. (1995). Infant-directed speech facilitates lexical learning in adults hearing Chinese: implications for language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 22(3), 703–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grijzenhout, J. & Joppen-Hellwig, S. (2006). The lack of onsets in German child phonology. In Lasser, I. (ed.), The process of language acquisition. Berlin/Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag.Google Scholar
Guy, G. (1991). Explanation in variable phonology: an exponential model of morphological constraints. Language Variation and Change 3, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heisler, L., Goffman, L. & Younger, B. (2004). The influence of semantic representations on speech production. Paper presented at the Child Phonology Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, May.Google Scholar
Hollich, G., Newman, R. & Jusczyk, P. (2005). Infants' use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech. Child Development 76, 598–613.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hua, Z. & Dodd, B. (2000). The phonological acquisition of Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese). Journal of Child Language 27(1), 3–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hunter, M. A. & Ames, E. W. (1988). A multifactor model of infant preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. Advances in Infancy Research 5, 69–95.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K. (2005). English-learning infants' representations of word-forms with iambic stress. Infancy 7, 95–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, E. K. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: when speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory and Language 44, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W. & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants' detection of sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 29, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. & Newsome, M. (1999). The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology 39, 159–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keating, P.Cho, T., Fougeron, C. & Hsu, C. (2003). Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages. In Local, J., Ogden, R. & Temple, R. (eds), Phonetic interpretation (Papers in laboratory phonology 6), 143–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Klatt, D. H. (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in connected discourse. Journal of Phonetics 3, 129–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacNeilage, P. F. & Davis, B. L. (1990). Acquisition of speech production: frames then content. In Jeannerod, M. (ed.), Attention and performance XII: motor representation and control, 453–76. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Mattys, S. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 27, 644–55.Google ScholarPubMed
Meier, R. P., McGarvin, L., Zakia, R. A. & Willerman, R. (1997). Silent mandibular oscillations in vocal babbling. Phonetica 54(3–4), 153–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nazzi, T., Dilley, L. C., Jusczyk, A. M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2005) English-learning infants' segmentation of verbs from fluent speech. Language & Speech 48, 279–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newman, R. S., Bernstein Ratner, N., Jusczyk, A. M., Jusczyk, P. W. & Dow, K. A. (2006). Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis. Developmental Psycholog 42(4), 643–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ramus, F. (2002). Language discrimination by newborns: teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues. Annual Review of Language Acquisition 2, 85–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seidl, A. (2007). Infants' use and weighting of prosodic cues in clause segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language 57, 24–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seidl, A. & Johnson, E. (2006). Infant word segmentation revisited: edge alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science 9(6), 565–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites from the development of grammar. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development, 407–31. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Kemler Nelson, D. & Jusczyk, P. (2003). The prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: evidence from prelinguistic infants. Journal of Memory and Language 49, 249–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesar, B. & Smolensky, P. (2000). Learnability in Optimality Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thiessen, E., Hill, E. & Saffran, J. (2005). Infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy 7(1), 53–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Ooijen, B. (1994). The processing of vowels and consonants. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.Google Scholar
van Lieshout, P. H., Starkweather, C. W., Hulstijn, W. & Peters, H. F. M. (1995). Effects of linguistic correlates of stuttering on emg activity in nonstuttering speakers. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 38, 360–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Werker, J. & Tees, R. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7, 49–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M. & Price, P. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91, 1707–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed