Prosody outweighs statistics in 6-month-old German-learning infants' speech segmentation

Mostra el registre complet Registre parcial de l'ítem

• dc.contributor.author Marimon Tarter, Mireia
• dc.contributor.author Langus, Alan
• dc.contributor.author Höhle, Barbara
• dc.date.accessioned 2025-06-10T09:59:52Z
• dc.date.available 2025-06-10T09:59:52Z
• dc.date.issued 2024
• dc.description.abstract It is well established that infants use various cues to find words within fluent speech from about 7 to 8 months of age. Research suggests that two main mechanisms support infants' speech segmentation: prosodic cues like the word stress patterns, and distributional cues like transitional probabilities (TPs). We tested 6-month-old German-learning infants' use of prosodic and statistical cues for speech segmentation in three experiments. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with an artificial language string where TPs signaled either word boundaries or iambic words—a stress pattern that is disfavored in German. Experiment 2 was a control and only the test phase was presented. In Experiment 3, prosodic cues were absent in the string and only TPs signaled word boundaries. All experiments included the same conditions at test: disyllabic words with high TPs in the string, words with low TPs and words with non-co-occurring syllables. Results showed that infants relied more strongly on prosodic cues than on TPs for word segmentation. Notably, no segmentation evidence emerged when prosodic cues were absent in the string. This finding underlines early impacts of language-specific structural properties on segmentation mechanisms.
• dc.description.sponsorship We would like to thank Tom Fritzsche for his assistance in running the experiments. We thank the Babylab Team and all the families that participated in the study. We would like to thank Erik Thiessen and Jenny Saffran for providing the stimuli used in their study. The work on this research was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreements nos. 641858 and 748909 and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) grant no. 317633480 (SFB 1287, Project C03).
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Marimon M, Langus A, Höhle B. Prosody outweighs statistics in 6-month-old German-learning infants' speech segmentation. Infancy. 2024 Sep-Oct;29(5):750-70. DOI: 10.1111/infa.12593
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12593
• dc.identifier.issn 1525-0008
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70651
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Wiley
• dc.relation.ispartof Infancy: the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies. 2024 Sep-Oct;29(5):750-70
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/641858
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/748909
• dc.rights © 2024 The Authors. Infancy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Congress of Infant Studies. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• dc.subject.other Anàlisi prosòdica (Lingüística)
• dc.subject.other Alemany -- Adquisició
• dc.subject.other Llengua segona -- Adquisició
• dc.subject.other Llenguatge i llengües -- Adquisició
• dc.subject.other Infants nadons
• dc.title Prosody outweighs statistics in 6-month-old German-learning infants' speech segmentation
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion