Studies of listeners' ability to distinguish languages when segmental information is eliminated have been taken as evidence for categorical rhythmic distinctions between language groups ("rhythm classes"). Furthermore, it has been suggested that sensitivity to rhythm class is present at birth and that infants must establish the rhythm class of…

This study examines the link between distributional patterns in the input and infants' acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In two Headturn Preference experiments, Dutch-learning 24-month-olds (but not 17-month-olds) were found to track the remote dependency between the definite article "het" and the diminutive suffix…

Emerging phonotactic knowledge facilitates the development of the mental lexicon, as demonstrated by studies showing that infants use the phonotactic patterns of their native language to extract words from continuous speech. The present study provides a computational account of how infants might induce phonotactics from their immediate language…

Four experiments explored French-learning infants' ability to segment words from fluent speech. The focus was on bisyllabic words to investigate whether infants segment them as whole words or segment each syllable individually. No segmentation effects were found in 8-month-olds. Twelve-month-olds segmented individually both the final syllables…

The location of phonological phrase boundaries was shown to affect lexical access by English-learning infants of 10 and 13 months of age. Experiments 1 and 2 used the head-turn preference procedure: infants were familiarized with two bisyllabic words, then presented with sentences that either contained the familiarized words or contained both…