Investigations of the word segmentation abilities of infants

Evidence that I presented at the last meeting in Yokohama indicated that English-learning infants first show some capacity for segmenting words from fluent speech at about 7.5 months of age. Further studies that we have conducted suggest that English-learning infants initially rely on a prosodically based strategy which may cause them to mis-segment words beginning with weak syllables. However, by 10.5 months, English-learners appear to draw on other potential sources of information to locate word boundaries, even for words beginning with weak syllables. Our studies suggest that infants do retain information about the sound patterns of words for up to 24 hours, and that they generalize across different talker's pronunciations of the same words.