Discovering Words

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Integrating across these lexical forms would yield a representation that is not specific to any particular set of phonemes (i.

This updated edition includes a few replacement words and new artwork, gently refreshing the content to help teach the basics of early language in English, French, and Cree.Previously, we have found that 7- and 9-month-old infants are able to learn an iambic bias that contradicts their native language. The book is arranged into subjects, within which a selection of words are traced back through the stages by which they came to be part of the English language, and through more recent changes over time in form and meaning.

For example, if infants extract the words BAby, DIAper, and SHOE, there is no consistent phonemic information. During the infants’ exposure to the artificial language, both words and part-words occurred equally often.The only cue to segmentation that is identical across the streams is the conditional statistical information, indicating that infants segmented on the basis of statistical cues. From the 'porcelain' on the table to the 'coin' in the Christmas pudding and the 'alcohol' poured over it, the book is an enlightening and amusing read. Nevertheless, infants succeed in this task before they have amassed a large lexicon of familiar word forms (e.

However, the claim that infants below 6 months are unable to segment speech on the basis of conditional statistical information may be incorrect. First, they reinforce the claim that sensitivity to statistical information is apparent for linguistic input at a younger age than the commonly cited 7–8 months (c. From our perspective, sensitivity to conditional statistical information is one of a small set of language-universal cues that help infants extract a set of lexical items from the input (for discussion, see Thiessen and Erickson, in press). Sensitivity to distributional statistical information, achieved by integrating information across many individual exemplars to yield a central tendency, can explain English-learning infants’ acquisition of a trochaic bias.The present studies replicate and extend prior work by Thiessen and Saffran (2003) demonstrating that sensitivity to conditional statistical information in speech is early developing, and appears to emerge – at least in English-learning infants – before the development of the trochaic bias.