Infants’ abilities to segment word forms from spectrally degraded speech in the first year of life

Infants begin to segment word forms from fluent speech—a crucial task in lexical processing—between 4 and 7 months of age. Prior work has established that infants rely on a variety of cues available in the speech signal (i.e., prosodic, statistical, acoustic-segmental, and lexical) to accomplish this task. In two experiments with French-learning 6- and 10-month-olds, we use a psychoacoustic approach to examine if and how degradation of the two fundamental acoustic components extracted from speech by the auditory system, namely, temporal (both frequency and amplitude modulation) and spectral information, impact word form segmentation. Infants were familiarized with passages containing target words, in which frequency modulation (FM) information was replaced with pure tones using a vocoder, while amplitude modulation (AM) was preserved in either 8 or 16 spectral bands. Infants were then tested on their recognition of the target versus novel control words. While the 6-month-olds were unable to segment in either condition, the 10-month-olds succeeded, although only in the 16 spectral band condition. These findings suggest that 6-month-olds need FM temporal cues for speech segmentation while 10-month-olds do not, although they need the AM cues to be presented in enough spectral bands (i.e., 16). This developmental change observed in infants’ sensitivity to spectrotemporal cues likely results from an increase in the range of available segmentation procedures, and/or shift from a vowel to a consonant bias in lexical processing between the two ages, as vowels are more affected by our acoustic manipulations.

Research Highlights

• Although segmenting speech into word forms is crucial for lexical acquisition, the acoustic information that infants’ auditory system extracts to process continuous speech remains unknown.
• We examined infants’ sensitivity to spectrotemporal cues in speech segmentation using vocoded speech, and revealed a developmental change between 6 and 10 months of age.
• We showed that FM information, that is, the fast temporal modulations of speech, is necessary for 6- but not 10-month-old infants to segment word forms.
• Moreover, reducing the number of spectral bands impacts 10-month-olds’ segmentation abilities, who succeed when 16 bands are preserved, but fail with 8 bands.