Boosting the input: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms.
Infancy
; 26(5): 745-755, 2021 09.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-34297896
ABSTRACT
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.
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Fonética
/
Desarrollo del Lenguaje
Tipo de estudio:
Diagnostic_studies
Límite:
Humans
/
Infant
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Infancy
Año:
2021
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Canadá