Explored English-learning infants' capacities to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech in a series of 15 experiments. Findings suggest that English learners may rely heavily on stress cues when they begin to segment words from fluent speech, but within a few months, infants learn to integrate multiple sources of information about word…

A diary study of the speech of a child acquiring English found eight between-word processes, all of which were optional and occurred in fairly restricted environments. Most of the processes were also of short duration. (Author/CB)

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates early literacy acquisition in Turkish with its phonologically transparent orthography and regular letter-sound correspondences. Findings reveal that such orthography fosters the early development of word recognition skills and that phonological awareness contributes to word recognition in the early stages of reading acquisition. (33…