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Related Experiment Videos

Stress changes the representational landscape: evidence from word segmentation.

Suzanne Curtin1, Toben H Mintz, Morten H Christiansen

  • 1Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, 2806 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. scurtin@pitt.edu

Cognition
|July 6, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Infants learn to use lexical stress to segment words in their native language. This stress information influences how infants process speech and form early word representations.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Infants are sensitive to their native language's stress patterns.
  • The role of stress in infant language development and speech representation is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how language exposure shapes infants' speech processing biases regarding lexical stress.
  • To determine if infants represent stressed and unstressed syllables differently.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of child-directed speech to examine changes in speech processing.
  • Experiments testing 7- and 9-month-old infants on stress-based segmentation of artificial language sequences.

Main Results:

  • Infants showed improved distribution-based word segmentation and an advantage for stress-initial syllable sequences.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Infants adopted a stress-initial syllable strategy when parsing speech.
  • Infants appear to encode stress information within their proto-lexical representations.

    • Conclusions:

    • Lexical stress in the ambient language shapes infants' statistical calculations over speech input.
    • Stress information is encoded in infants' representations of parsed speech sequences, influencing early language acquisition.