Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues

Abstract

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions of six bisyllabic target nonwords. After exposure, the participants were given a forced choice recognition test to judge which strings had been present in the input. Experiment 1 demonstrated that English speakers used trochaic stress to isolate strings, despite being unfamiliar with Dutch phonotactics. Experiment 2 showed benefits from invariance introduced by affricates, which are typically found at on-sets of final syllables in Dutch diminutives. Together, the results demonstrate that diminutives contain prosodie and distributional features that are beneficial for word segmentation. Copyright 2005 Psychonomic Society, Inc.