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Related Experiment Videos

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants.

Elizabeth K Johnson1, Peter W Jusczyk, Anne Cutler

  • 1Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Cognitive Psychology
|March 21, 2003
PubMed
Summary

Twelve-month-old infants show early signs of understanding word segmentation, favoring lexically viable word chunks in fluent speech. This suggests infants apply the Possible Word Constraint during speech processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • The Possible Word Constraint (PWC) is a principle in speech recognition that favors parsing speech into lexically viable units.
  • Adults utilize the PWC to disfavor segmentations containing non-word chunks, improving speech recognition efficiency.
  • Understanding infant speech perception requires investigating their ability to apply such constraints during word recognition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether 12-month-old infants apply the Possible Word Constraint (PWC) in word recognition.
  • To determine if infants parse fluent speech into lexically viable chunks, similar to adults.
  • To examine the role of target word position (beginning vs. end) in infant speech segmentation.

Main Methods:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Five experiments employed the head-turn preference procedure to assess infant listening behavior.
  • Infants were familiarized with target words and then tested on lists containing these words in 'possible' and 'impossible' contexts (nonsense and real words).
  • Listening times were recorded to infer infants' preferences for different segmentation types.

    • Main Results:

    • Infants listened longer to target words in 'possible' contexts when targets appeared at the end of nonsense items (Experiments 1 & 2).
    • This 'possible' context preference extended to both beginning and end positions when real words in sentential contexts were used (Experiments 3 & 4).
    • No significant effect of the PWC was observed when target words were at the beginning of isolated real words (Experiment 5).

    Conclusions:

    • Twelve-month-old infants demonstrate an ability to observe lexical viability constraints when segmenting fluent speech.
    • Infants' application of the PWC appears to be influenced by the context (nonsense vs. real words) and target word position.
    • These findings suggest that infants actively use lexical knowledge to parse speech, supporting early word recognition development.