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Segmentation of vowel-initial words is facilitated by function words
1Department of Linguistics,University of California,Los Angeles.
Journal of Child Language
|August 28, 2014
Summary
Infants learn to segment words from speech. Function words like "the" help 11-month-olds segment vowel-initial words, an ability not seen in younger infants.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Infants learn to segment words from fluent speech within their first year.
- Research indicates 7.5-month-olds segment consonant-initial words, but vowel-initial word segmentation emerges later (13-16 months).
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if younger infants can segment vowel-initial words.
- To determine the role of function words in early word segmentation.
Main Methods:
- Five experiments were conducted with infants aged 0;8 and 0;11.
- Infants' ability to segment vowel-initial words following the function word "the" was tested.
- A bottom-up, phonotactic account was ruled out.
Main Results:
- Infants aged 0;11 could segment vowel-initial words following "the".
- Infants aged 0;8 did not show this ability.
- Results were not explained by phonotactic probabilities.
Conclusions:
- Function words, specifically "the", facilitate the segmentation of vowel-initial words for 11-month-old infants.
- This segmentation ability appears in sentence-medial contexts.
- The findings advance understanding of early language acquisition and word segmentation mechanisms.
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