Use of Statistical and Acoustic Cues for Speech Segmentation in French-Learning 7-Month-Old Infants and French-Speaking Adults.

Abstract

Young infants can segment continuous speech with acoustic as well as statistical cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. This study investigates the use of acoustic and statistical cues by both adult French speakers and 6-to-7-month-old French-learning infants. Both groups were familiarized with a naturally recorded string, alternating either in duration (long-short) or in intensity (soft-loud). In addition, statistical cues were present in both strings, signaling different word boundaries than the acoustic cues. The adults were tested in a recognition task and the infants with the Head-turn Preference Procedure. Results show that the French-speaking adults segmented the strings by responding to the acoustic cues in both familiarization conditions, following the predictions of the Iambic-Trochaic Law. In contrast, the French-learning infants displayed segmentation based on TPs in the Intensity condition only. These findings collectively contribute to our understanding of how the use of acoustic and statistical cues to decode linguistic input changes between infancy and adulthood and differs across languages.