Poster I5

Prosody is the key: ERP studies on word segmentation in 6 and 12-month-old German infants

Claudia Männel¹, Angela D. Friederici¹;¹Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Most speech directed towards infants consists of multiword sentences. Thus, before lexical-semantic learning can take place infants have to segment individual words from continuous speech. Previous studies have shown that between 7.5 and 10 months, infants begin to recognize sentence-embedded words, when previously familiarized with these words in isolation (e.g., Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999; Kooijman, Hagoort, & Cutler, 2005). These studies indicate that infants start to segment familiarized words from continuous speech at around 7 months. In the current ERP studies, we investigated word segmentation following infants’ natural environment by presenting whole sentences during familiarization. We explored the impact of prosody on infants’ word segmentation abilities by using infant-directed speech with or without accent on the words to be familiarized. Six- and 12-month-olds listened to blocks of eight different sentences each containing the same low-frequency bisyllabic word. Each block was followed by four test tokens of the familiarized and a new word. During test, ERPs of 6-month-olds revealed differences between word types, but only for those words that had been prosodically marked during familiarization. This indicates that even 6-month-olds are able to segment words from sentences, but only when these words are prosodically accentuated. For 12-month-olds, who showed word segmentation independent of prosodic realization, prosody still facilitates word recognition as indicated by more negative ERP responses to previously accentuated words than non-accentuated ones. In conclusion, the current data emphasize the crucial role of prosody in infants’ early arising ability to segment words from continuous speech.

Keywords: Primary = LANGUAGE: Development & aging; Secondary = LANGUAGE: Other

 
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