1-059 - Pathways to word learning: the effect of exposure and learning of language specific rules

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From 6 months onwards, infants exhibit a high sensitivity to contrasts in their native language, but not in an unknown language (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984). Learning phonological rules should be an effective tool for word segmentation (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) and the following contributions examine how language-specific rules and experience can shape these abilities.
In the first two papers, 9-11-month-olds were found to be sensitive to phonological word-internal vowel-related phenomena: vowel-tier frequency in Hebrew and word-ending vowel legality in English. These abilities to pay attention to specific word-structure rules (e.g. Skoruppa et al, 2013; Jusczyk et al., 1993) might boost subsequent segmentation abilities. The third paper however suggests that the ability to segment might be strongly dependent upon language-specific exposure. Evidence from German 7.5-month-olds shows that lab-confined exposure is not enough for infants to segment words in passages, contrary to American-English data, but week-long exposure is. The fourth paper investigates infants’ learning of assimilation rules, which are important for lexical access at word junctions. In a mismatch paradigm where the deviant trial contained a voicing assimilation, French-learning 14-month-olds, contrary to adults, discriminated both native and non-native assimilations.
Altogether, these studies point to infants’ impressive abilities to retrieve a variety of fine-grained phonological rules from speech, and also suggest that the emergence of word segmentation abilities is strongly driven by exposure.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Claire Delle Luche, University of Plymouth

Individual Presentations

• The recognition of vocalic patterns in words in 9-11 month-old infants learning Hebrew - Presenting Author: Osnat Segal, Tel Aviv University; Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Univ of York; Marilyn M Vihman, University of York

• The role of vowel phonotactics in native speech segmentation - Presenting Author: Katrin Skoruppa, University of Essex; Claire Delle Luche, University of Plymouth; Stuart Rosen, University College of Londond; Andrew Nevins, University College of London; Laurence White, Plymouth University; Caroline Floccia, Plymouth University

• Impact of long-term exposure on infants’ word segmentation in infant- and adult-directed speech contexts - Presenting Author: Melanie Steffi Schreiner, N/A; Nivedita Mani, N/A

• The acquisition of native assimilation rules: evidence from event-related potentials - Presenting Author: Mathilde Fort, University Pompeu Fabra, Center for Brain and Cognition; perrine brusini, École Normale Supérieure; Julia Carbajal, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique; Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, INSERM and LPPS, Neurospin; Sharon Peperkamp, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique