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Language Development

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 12, 2026

Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

Published on: January 23, 2017

Infants' sensitivity to allophonic cues for word segmentation.

P W Jusczyk¹, E A Hohne, A Bauman

¹Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. jusczyk@jhu.edu

Perception & Psychophysics

|December 22, 1999

Summary

Nine-month-old infants struggle with allophonic cues for word segmentation. However, by 10.5 months, infants can use these subtle phonetic cues to identify words in fluent speech.

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Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Published on: May 15, 2019

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Infants learn language through complex auditory processing.
Word segmentation is a crucial early linguistic skill.
The role of phonetic cues in infant word segmentation is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if English-learning infants can use allophonic cues to segment words.
To determine the developmental trajectory of using allophonic cues for word segmentation.
To examine the interplay between allophonic and distributional cues in word segmentation.

Main Methods:

Four experiments involving infant familiarization and testing in fluent speech passages.
Familiarization with two-syllable word pairs (e.g., nitrates/night rates).
Testing infants' ability to detect familiarized words amidst acoustically similar foils.

Main Results:

Nine-month-olds did not effectively use allophonic cues alone for segmentation.
Distributional cues aided 9-month-olds in segmenting familiarized words.
Ten-and-a-half-month-olds successfully segmented words using only allophonic cues.

Conclusions:

Allophonic cue use for word segmentation emerges later in infancy.
Distributional information supports early word segmentation development.
Findings illuminate the developmental progression of auditory word segmentation skills.