In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8-month-old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable-timed and Canada English is stress-timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that…

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants' precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first year of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To…

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential…

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for…

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language-specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well-formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning…

Six-, 12-, and 18-month-old English-hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation-dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability…

We examined infants' recognition of functors and the accuracy of the representations that infants construct of the perceived word forms. Auditory stimuli were "Functor + Content Word" versus "Nonsense Functor + Content Word" sequences. Eight-, 11-, and 13-month-old infants heard both real functors and matched nonsense functors (prosodically…

We investigated the developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency learning in an artificial language. Infants were exposed to 1 of 2 artificial languages with utterances of the form [aXc or bXd] (Grammar 1) or [aXd or bXc] (Grammar 2). In both languages, the grammaticality of an utterance depended on the relation between the 1st and 3rd…

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head-turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English- learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty-four 10.5-month-olds were familiarized…

Over half the world's population speaks a tone language, yet infant speech perception research has typically focused on consonants and vowels. Very young infants can discriminate a wide range of native and nonnative consonants and vowels, and then in a process of "perceptual reorganization" over the 1st year, discrimination of most…