The beginnings of word segmentation in english-learning infants.

By Peter W. Jusczyk, D. Houston, M. Newsome. 1999

A series of 15 experiments was conducted to explore English-learning infants' capacities to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The studies in Part I focused on 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with strong/weak stress patterns from fluent speech. The infants demonstrated an ability to detect strong/weak target words in sentential contexts. Moreover, the findings indicated that the infants were responding to the whole words and not to just their strong syllables. In Part II, a parallel series of studies was conducted examining 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with weak/strong stress patterns. In contrast with the results for strong/weak words, 7.5 month olds appeared to missegment weak/strong words. They demonstrated a tendency to treat strong syllables as markers of word onsets. In addition, when weak/strong words co-occurred with a particular following weak syllable (e.g., "guitar is"), 7.5 month olds appeared to misperceive these as strong/weak words (e.g., "taris"). The studies in Part III examined the abilities of 10.5 month olds to segment weak/strong words from fluent speech. These older infants were able to segment weak/strong words correctly from the various contexts in which they appeared. Overall, the findings suggest that English learners may rely heavily on stress cues when they begin to segment words from fluent speech. However, within a few months time, infants learn to integrate multiple sources of information about the likely boundaries of words in fluent speech.

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

In Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Unsupervised Speech Recognition (2021, background): “On the other hand, humans learn a lot about speech simply by listening to others around them and without explicit supervision (Werker and Tees, 1984; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Polka and Werker, 1994; Jusczyk et al., 1999; Johnson and Jusczyk, 2001).”
Auditory Processing of Amplitude Envelope Rise Time in Adults Diagnosed With Developmental Dyslexia (2007, background): “Speech rhythm provides a cue to potential word boundaries (eg, Cutler & Mehler, 1993 ), and rhythmic stress is actively used by infants for segmenting words from the speech stream (eg, Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999 ).”
Rise time perception and detection of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia (2011, background): “Jusczyk, Houston, and Newsome (1999) reported that infants could segment words with strong–weak patterns by 7½ months of age, but appeared to mis-segment words following a weak– strong pattern.”
Preference and processing: The role of speech affect in early spoken word recognition (2004, background): “…observed in infant cognition tasks, and, as noted earlier, both have been observed in previous studies of early linguistic processing (e.g., in studies using HPP, Houston & Jusczyk, 2000 and Jusczyk et al., 1999 report familiarity effects, whereas H€ohle & Weissenborn, 2003 report novelty effects).”
Rhythm and reading development in school-age children: a longitudinal study (2007, background): “Researchers suggest that the strong–weak pattern of stressed syllables typical of English is used by infants as young as 7.5 months to segment words in continuous speech ( Jusczyk, Houston & Newsome, 1999 ).”
Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues (2002, unknown): “Convincing evidence has been provided that this very strategy may underlie the ﬁrst steps of lexical acquisition in English (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999).”