Rhythm perception helps young infants find structure in both speech and music. However, it remains unknown whether categorical perception of suprasegmental linguistic rhythm signaled by a co-variation of multiple acoustic cues can be modulated by prior between- (music) and within-domain (language) experience. Here we tested 6-month-old…

Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) is associated with long-term risks for health and neurodevelopment, but recently, studies have also started exploring how preterm birth affects early language development in the 1st year of life. Because the timing and quality of auditory and visual input is very different for preterm versus full-term…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Infants attune to their native language during the first two years of life, as attested by decreases in the processing of nonnative phonological sounds and reductions in the range of possible sounds accepted as labels for native words. The present study shows that French-learning infants aged 1;8 can learn new words in an unfamiliar language,…

Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant-specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical…

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies--relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve…

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two…

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French-learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language-general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of…

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French-learning infants' perceptual preference for…

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of…

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same…

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full-term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e. rhythm, intonation), have suggested that prosodic perception development in preterms is indexed by maturational rather than postnatal/listening age. However, because prosody is heard…

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this…

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

A visual fixation study tested whether 7-month-olds can discriminate between different talkers. The infants were first habituated to talkers producing sentences in either a familiar or unfamiliar language, then heard test sentences from previously unheard speakers, either in the language used for habituation, or in another language. When the…