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Updated: Jul 17, 2026
06:34
Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns?
1Department of Psychology and Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. sven.mattys@bris.ac.uk
Summary
Infants do not segment words based solely on familiar sounds. Research shows babies use acoustic and phonetic cues to identify word boundaries, with a developmental lag for vowel-initial words.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infant word segmentation is crucial for language acquisition.
- Previous research explored if infants rely on familiar sound patterns for segmentation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test if infant word segmentation relies only on familiar sound patterns, irrespective of true word boundaries.
- To investigate the role of acoustic and allophonic cues in infant word segmentation.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the headturn preference procedure in eight experiments.
- Presented infants with passages containing phonemic patterns across word boundaries and actual words.
Main Results:
- 8.5-month-olds did not mis-segment consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words across boundaries but segmented them when present.
- 16-month-olds segmented vowel-consonant (VC) words but did not falsely segment straddling CVC words.
- A significant developmental gap was observed in segmenting consonant-initial versus vowel-initial words.
Conclusions:
- Infant word segmentation is not solely based on recurring phonemic patterns.
- Infants are sensitive to acoustic and allophonic cues signaling word boundaries.
- Developmental differences exist in early word segmentation abilities.
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