Discovering Words

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These lexical items, in turn, are likely to follow the predominant phonological characteristics of the lexical forms in the native language (e.

Lexical stress was created through the alteration of three parameters: pitch contour, amplitude, and duration. From this perspective, infants’ and adults’ use of phonological cues is not a sign that statistical learning is unimportant for language acquisition. indicating that infants exposed to both languages listened for similar times to words and part-words. The fact that infants show a different pattern of preference after listening to the trochaic and iambic familiarization streams indicates that they segmented different items from the two streams.

When the observing experimenter pressed a key indicating that the infant had fixated, the monitor displayed a video of a looming green ball on a black background, while the speakers began to play the test item (either word or part-word) separated by 1.

When the infant looked away for more than two consecutive seconds, the test trial ended and the attention-getting video reappeared on the central monitor. When exposed to a stream of syllables, English-learning infants and English-speaking adults treat the stressed syllables as word onsets (e.Even though infants at this age are capable of segmenting fluent speech in a laboratory setting, they may not yet have extracted many words from natural linguistic input. Whereas conditional learning results in the segmentation of a discrete item from a larger continuous array of stimuli (such as words from a sentence), distributional learning results in a combination of information from multiple stimuli into a central tendency or prototypical configuration (e. To the extent that 5-month-olds are familiar with any lexical items, they have likely already begun to identify some acoustic regularities across those forms.