When cues collide: Use of stress and statistical cues to word boundaries by 7- to 9-month-old infants.

TLDR

Prior research indicates that stress cues are crucial for English‑hearing infants to detect word boundaries, but it remains unclear how infants learn to attend to stress as a segmentation cue. The experiments aimed to investigate how infants of different ages attend to conflicting stress and statistical cues during word segmentation. Nine‑month‑old infants relied on stress cues while ignoring statistical cues, whereas seven‑month‑olds favored statistical cues, suggesting that infants use statistical learning to locate words and then learn stress patterns, with segmentation strategies evolving with age.

Abstract

Prior research suggests that stress cues are particularly important for English-hearing infants' detection of word boundaries. It is unclear, though, how infants learn to attend to stress as a cue to word segmentation. This series of experiments was designed to explore infants' attention to conflicting cues at different ages. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings: When stress and statistical cues indicated different word boundaries, 9-month-old infants used syllable stress as a cue to segmentation while ignoring statistical cues. However, in Experiment 2, 7-month-old infants attended more to statistical cues than to stress cues. These results raise the possibility that infants use their statistical learning abilities to locate words in speech and use those words to discover the regular pattern of stress cues in English. Infants at different ages may deploy different segmentation strategies as a function of their current linguistic experience.