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Cited by 233Language Development and DisordersPhonetics and Phonology ResearchReading and Literacy Development

Do infants perceive word boundaries? An empirical study of the bootstrapping of lexical acquisition

Christophe, Anne, Dupoux, Emmanuel, Bertoncini, Josiane, Mehler, Jacques·1994·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
DOI 10.1121/1.408544
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Abstract

Babies, like adults, hear mostly continuous speech. Unlike adults, however, they are not acquainted with the words that constitute the utterances; yet in order to construct representations for words, they have to retrieve them from the speech wave. Given the apparent lack of obvious cues to word boundaries (such as pauses between words), this is not a trivial problem. Among the several mechanisms that could be explored to solve this bootstrapping problem for lexical acquisition, a tentative but reasonable one posits the existence of some cues (other than silence) that signal word boundaries. In order to test this hypothesis, infants were used as informants in our experiments. It was hypothesized that if word boundary cues exist, and if infants are to use them in the course of language acquisition, then they should at least perceive these cues. As a consequence, infants should be able to discriminate sequences that contain a word boundary from those that do not. A number of bisyllabic stimuli were extracted either from within French words (e.g., mati in mathématicien), or from between words (e.g., mati in panorama typique). Three-day-old infants were tested with a non-nutritive sucking paradigm, and the results of two experiments suggest that infants can discriminate between items that contain a word boundary and items that do not. It is therefore conceivable that newborns are already sensitive to cues that correlate with word boundaries. This result lends plausibility to the hypothesis that infants might use word boundary cues during lexical acquisition.

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  • One type of cue that is likely to be particularly useful in word segmentation is statistical information derived from the distribution of patterns of sounds.

    “One type of cue that is likely to be particularly useful in word segmentation is statistical information derived from the distribution of patterns of sounds (Hayes and Clark, 1970;Goodsitt et al., 1993;Christophe et al., 1994;Brent and Cartwright, 1996;Saffran et al., 1996a;Saffran et al., 1996b;Saffran et al., 1997;Aslin et al., 1998;Christiansen et al., 1998).”

    From Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults (1999) · cites this paper as Christophe et al., 1994

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Authors
Christophe, A., Dupoux, E., Bertoncini, J., & Mehler, J.
Affiliations
  • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
  • Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, France
ORCID
Christophe, Anne
Venue
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Publisher
Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Published
1994-03-01
Volume
95
Issue
3
Pages
1570-1580
ISSN
  • 0001-4966 (ISSN-L)
  • 1520-8524
DOI
10.1121/1.408544
OpenAlex
W1979285432
Cited by
233
References
15
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 19 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 14 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 6
FWCI
10.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
Keywords
word boundaries, lexical bootstrapping, infant language acquisition, neonates, non-nutritive sucking, infant speech perception
MeSH terms
Arousal, Attention, Female, Habituation, Psychophysiologic, Humans, Infant, Newborn, Language Development, Male, Phonetics, Psychoacoustics, Speech Acoustics, Speech Perception, Sucking Behavior, Verbal Learning

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