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Updated: Oct 13, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
Séverine Millotte1, James Morgan2, Sylvie Margules3
1Laboratoire d'Étude d'Apprentissage et du, Dévelopement, CNSR - UMR, 5022, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France.
Abstract:
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary. We compare these results with similar results obtained with English-speaking infants, and discuss their implication for lexical and syntactic acquisition.
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