Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T05:30:47.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Early word segmentation in infants acquiring Parisian French: task-dependent and dialect-specific aspects*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

THIERRY NAZZI*
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France and CNRS, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris, France
KARIMA MERSAD
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
MEGHA SUNDARA
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
GALINA IAKIMOVA
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
LINDA POLKA
Affiliation:
School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University
*
Address for correspondence: Thierry Nazzi, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Institut Pluridisciplinaire des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75006 Paris, France. tel: +33·1·42·86·43·15; fax: +33.1.42·86·33·22. e-mail: thierry.nazzi@parisdescartes.fr

Abstract

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect has a cost. Infants were tested on standard European or Canadian French stimuli, in the word–passage or passage–word order. Our study first establishes an early onset of segmentation abilities: Parisian infants segment bisyllabic words at age 0;8 in the passage–word order only (revealing a robust order of presentation effect). Second, it shows that there are differences in segmentation abilities across Parisian and Canadian French infants, and that there is a cost for cross-dialect segmentation for Parisian infants. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding word segmentation processes.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This study was conducted with the support of an ANR grant # 07-BLAN-0014-01 to TN and a grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada to LP. Special thanks to the infants and their parents for their kindness and cooperation, Léo-Lyuki Nishibayashi for help with the testing, and James White for carefully proofreading the manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D., Gooding, T. N., Orlando, C. B. & Quann, C. A. (2009). Development of phonological constancy: toddlers' perception of native- and Jamaican-accented words. Psychological Science 20, 539–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81, B33B44.Google Scholar
Butler, J., Floccia, C., Goslin, J. & Panneton, R. (2011). Infants' discrimination of familiar and unfamiliar accents in speech. Infancy 16, 392417.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Curtin, S., Mintz, T. H. & Christiansen, M. H. (2005). Stress changes the representational landscape: evidence from word segmentation. Cognition 96, 233–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fernald, A. & Simon, T. (1984). Expanded intonation contours in mothers' speech to newborns. Developmental Psychology 20, 104–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez Gomez, N. & Nazzi, T. (in press). Effects of prior phonotactic knowledge on infant word segmentation: the case of non-adjacent dependencies. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.Google Scholar
Gout, A., (2001). Etapes précoces de l'acquisition du lexique. Unpublished dissertation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.Google Scholar
Gout, A., Christophe, A. & Morgan, J. L. (2004). Phonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access II. Infant data. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 548–67.Google Scholar
Goyet, L., de Schonen, S. & Nazzi, T. (2010). Syllables in word segmentation by French-learning infants: an ERP study. Brain Research 1332, 7589.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Graf Estes, K., Evans, J. L., Alibali, M. W. & Saffran, J. R. (2007). Can infants map meaning to newly segmented words? Statistical segmentation and word learning. Psychological Science 18, 254–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Höhle, B. & Weissenborn, J. (2003). German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech. Developmental Science 6, 122–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houston, D. M. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2000). The role of talker-specific information in word segmentation by infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 26, 1570–82.Google ScholarPubMed
Houston, D. M. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). Infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words and voices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 29, 1143–54.Google ScholarPubMed
Houston, D. M., Jusczyk, P. W., Kuijpers, C., Coolen, R. & Cutler, A. (2000). Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds. Psychonomics Bulletin & Review 7, 504–09.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, E. K. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: when speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory and Language 44, 120.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K. & Seidl, A. (2009). At 11 months, prosody still outranks statistics. Developmental Science 12, 131141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, E. K. & Tyler, M. (2010). Testing the limits of statistical learning for word segmentation. Developmental Science 13, 339–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W. & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants' detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 29, 123.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Hohne, E. A. & Bauman, A. (1999a). Infants' sensitivity to allophonic cues for word segmentation. Perception & Psychophysics 62, 1465–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. M., & Newsome, M. (1999b). The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology 39, 159207.Google Scholar
Kooijman, V., Hagoort, P. & Cutler, A. (2005). Electrophysiological evidence for prelinguistic infants' word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Brain Research 24, 109–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kooijman, V., Hagoort, P., Cutler, A. (2009). Prosodic structure in early word segmentation: ERP evidence from Dutch ten-month-olds. Infancy 6, 591612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marquis, A. & Shi, R. (2008). Segmentation of verb forms in preverbal infants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123, EL105EL110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mattys, S. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001a). Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants. Cognition 78, 91121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mattys, S. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001b). Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, 644–55.Google ScholarPubMed
Mattys, S., Jusczyk, P. W., Luce, P. A. & Morgan, J. L. (1999). Phonotactic and prosodic effects on word segmentation in infants. Cognitive Psychology 38, 465–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Menard, L., Ouellon, C. & Dolbec, J. (1999). Prosodic markers of regional group membership: the case of the French of Quebec versus France. In Ohala, J. (ed.), Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 2, 1601–04. San Francisco: University of California.Google Scholar
Mersad, K. & Nazzi, T. (2012). When Mommy comes to the rescue of statistics: infants combine top-down and bottom-up cues to segment speech. Language Learning and Development 8, 303–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nazzi, T., Dilley, L. C., Jusczyk, A. M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2005). English-learning infants' segmentation of verbs from fluent speech. Language and Speech 48, 279–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nazzi, T., Iakimova, I., Bertoncini, J., Frédonie, S. & Alcantara, C. (2006). Early segmentation of fluent speech by infants acquiring French: emerging evidence for crosslinguistic differences. Journal of Memory and Language 54, 283–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nazzi, T., Jusczyk, P. W. & Johnson, E. K. (2000). Language discrimination by English learning 5-month-olds: effects of rhythm and familiarity. Journal of Memory and Language 43, 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, R., Bernstein Ratner, N., Jusczyk, A. M., Jusczyk, P. W. & Dow, K. A. (2006). Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis. Developmental Psychology 42, 643–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papousek, M., Papousek, H. & Haekel, M. (1987). Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 16, 491516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pelucchi, B., Hay, J. F. & Saffran, J. R. (2009). Statistical learning in a natural language by 8-month-old infants. Child Development 80, 674685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Picard, M. (1987). An Introduction to the comparative phonetics of English and French in North America. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polka, L. & Sundara, M. (2012). Word segmentation in monolingual infants acquiring Canadian English and Canadian French: native language, cross-dialect, and cross-language comparisons. Infancy 17, 198232.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N. & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmale, R., Cristia, A., Seidl, A. & Johnson, E. K. (2010). Developmental changes in infants' ability to cope with dialect variation in word recognition. Infancy 15, 650–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seidl, A. & Johnson, E. K. (2006). Infant word segmentation revisited: edge alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science 9, 565–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shi, R. & Lepage, M. (2008). The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants. Developmental Science 11, 407–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singh, L., Morgan, J. L. & White, K. S. (2004). Preference and processing: the role of speech affect in early spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 173–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thiessen, E. D., Hill, E. A. & Saffran, J. R. (2005). Infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy 7, 5371.Google Scholar
Thiessen, E. D. & Saffran, J. R. (2003). When cues collide: use of stress and statistical cues to word boundaries by 7- to 9-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology 39, 706–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van de Weijer, J. (1998). Language input for word discovery. Doctoral dissertation, University of Nijmegen (MPI Series in Psycholinguistics, 9).Google Scholar
van Heugten, M. & Johnson, E. K. (2012). Infants exposed to fluent natural speech succeed at cross-gender word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 55, 554–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed