Boosting the input: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms

Autor: Suzanne Curtin, Natalia Czarnecki, Stephanie L. Archer
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesREFERENCES. 26(5)
ISSN: 1532-7078
Popis: To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms. We explore whether the capacity to access low-frequency phonotactic combinations is available at 9 months when pre-exposed to wordforms containing statistically low combinations of segments. Using a modified head-turn procedure, one group of infants was presented with nonwords with low-frequency complex onsets (dr-), and another group was presented with zero-frequency onset nonwords (dl-). Following pre-exposure and familiarization, infants were then tested on their ability to segment nonwords that contained either the low- or the zero-frequency onsets. Only infants in the low-frequency condition were successful at the task, suggesting some experience with these onsets supports segmentation.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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