Cross-linguistic differences in early word form segmentation: a rhythmic-based account

Cross-linguistic differences in early word form segmentation: a rhythmic-based account

The present paper reviews recent studies on the early segmentation of word forms from fluent speech. After having exposed the importance of this issue from a developmental point of view, we summarize studies conducted on this issue with American English-learning infants. These studies show that segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, develop during the following months, and rely on infan...

Rhythmic segmentation in auditory illusions - Evidence from cross-linguistic mondegreens

When confronted with non-native songs, listeners occasionally experience auditory illusions and perceive words in their native language although they are fully aware of the song lyrics being sung in a different language. We compiled two corpora with the original language of the song lyrics being English and the percept being either German or French. Against these two corpora, we tested the rhyt...

Word Segmentation in Natural Speech. 1 Diminutives Facilitate Word Segmentation in Natural Speech: Cross-Linguistic Evidence

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: cross-linguistic evidence.

Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence fo...

A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence.

This research concerns how children learn the distinction between substance names and object names. Quine (1969) proposed that children learn the distinction through learning the syntactic distinctions inherent in count/mass grammar. However, Soja et al. (1991) found that English-speaking 2-year-olds, who did not seem to have acquired count/mass grammar, distinguished objects from substances in...