Infants use prosodically conditioned acoustic-phonetic cues to extract words from speech

Abstract

The Headturn Preference Paradigm was used to examine infants’ use of prosodically conditioned acoustic-phonetic cues to find words in speech. Twelve-month-olds were familiarized to one passage containing an intended target (e.g., toga from toga#lore) and one passage containing an unintended target (e.g., dogma from dog#maligns). Infants were tested on the familiarized intended word (e.g., toga), familiarized unintended word (e.g., dogma), and two unfamiliar words. Infants listened longer to familiar intended words than to familiar unintended or unfamiliar words, demonstrating their use of word-level prosodically conditioned cues to segment words from speech. Implications for models of developmental speech perception are discussed.