Discovering Words

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Additionally, we will investigate whether infants at this young age prioritize conditional statistical information over lexical stress as a cue to word segmentation, consistent with the statistical bootstrapping account. Second, infants must be capable of learning from the distribution of lexical stress in word forms with which they are familiar before 6 months.

In Experiment 1, we seek to provide additional evidence that infants are able to segment fluent speech below 6 months of age. The pitch peak of the vowels varied between 255 and 270 Hz, compared to a monotonic 200 Hz for the unstressed syllables. A new format for young readers transforms Neepin Auger’s bestselling board books into playful and colourful resources for elementary school children.Now the expressively descriptive and impressive accompanying pictures (with of course one illustrative spread for each letter of the alphabet) by Canadian Cree author/illustrator Neepin Auger (who is the daughter of renowned First Nations artist Dale Auger) are bright, simple, uncluttered (and appreciatively Auger with Discovering Words also strives to use as many objects and images as possible that have cultural sigificance to and for First Nations children, such as a canoe for the letter C, a drum for the letter D, moccasins for the letter M and so on and so on). However, if infants segment the artificial language via lexical stress, they should show the opposite pattern of preference across the two languages, because lexical stress occurs in word-initial position in the trochaic language and word-final position in the iambic language. Since the initial demonstration that 8-month-old infants are capable of extracting word forms in fluent speech solely by sensitivity to conditional statistical information, the question of how this sensitivity to statistical information might contribute to language acquisition has been a central one in the field of language development.

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. Before exposure to the to-be-segmented artificial language, infants heard a list of 30 CVCV bisyllabic nonsense words, repeated twice, for a total of 60 words. Discovering Words: English, French, Cree is the second edition of this book illustrated by Neepin Auger, a Cree artist and educator, This is a new format for young readers and transforms Neepin Auger’s bestselling board books into playful and colourful resources for elementary school children.Therefore, it is likely that if 5-month-olds – who have less familiarity with the trochaic pattern of English than 7- or 9-month-olds – are able to learn a trochaic pattern, they would also be able to learn an iambic pattern. A paired-samples t-test (all t-tests reported here and in subsequent experiments are two-tailed) revealed that the difference in listening times as a function of test item type was significant, t(9) = 2.