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Perception and Acquisition of Linguistic Rhythm by Infants

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Perception and Acquisition of Linguistic Rhythm by Infants Speech Communication 41 (2003) 233–243 www.elsevier.com/locate/specom Perception and acquisition of linguistic rhythm by infants Thierry Nazzi a,*, Franck Ramus b a Laboratoire Cognition et Developpement, CNRS, Universite Paris 5, 71, Avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt Cedex, France b Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK Abstract In the present paper, we address the issue of the emergence in infancy of speech segmentation procedures that were found to be specific to rhythmic classes of languages in adulthood. These metrical procedures, which segment fluent speech into its constitutive word sequence, are crucial for the acquisition by infants of the words of their native lan- guage. We first present a prosodic bootstrapping proposal according to which the acquisition of these metrical seg- mentation procedures would be based on an early sensitivity to rhythm (and rhythmic classes). We then review several series of experiments that have studied infantsÕ ability to discriminate languages between birth and 5 months, in an attempt to specify their sensitivity to rhythm and the implication of rhythm perception in the acquisition of these segmentation procedures. The results presented here establish infantsÕ sensitivity to rhythmic classes (from birth on- wards). They further show an evolution of infantsÕ language discriminations between birth and 5 months which, though not inconsistent with our proposal, nevertheless call for more studies on the possible implication of rhythm in the acquisition of the metrical segmentation procedures. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction necting of these sound patterns to the lexical representations stored in the lexicon. Hence for The focus of the present paper is on the issue of adults, this task could be facilitated by the lexicon the segmentation of fluent speech into words, and itself, making it a problem of word recognition as more particularly on the development of speech well as (or rather than) a problem of word seg- segmentation procedures during infancy. For mentation. However, the segmentation task has to adults, speech segmentation involves language- be different for the infant who, starting with no specific phonological procedures (see below, and lexicon and no language-specific phonological Cutler, McQueen and Norris, this volume) that knowledge, has to discover, rather than recognize, allow for the retrieval of the acoustic sound pat- the words in the input and learn the speech seg- terns of words from fluent speech, and the con- mentation procedure appropriate to the language to be learnt. In the following, we present several studies that have recently investigated the issue of word segmentation in early infancy. These studies * Corresponding author. Tel.: +33-1-5520-5992; fax: +33-1- 5520-5985. have first established that speech segmentation E-mail address: [email protected] (T. emerges between 6 and 7.5 months of age in En- Nazzi). glish-learning American infants, hence months 0167-6393/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0167-6393(02)00106-1 234 T. Nazzi, F. Ramus / Speech Communication 41 (2003) 233–243 before the onset of lexical comprehension and Finally, it was shown that 9- to 10.5-month-old production (Jusczyk and Aslin, 1995). They have American infants rely on the typical stress pattern then set out to specify the kind of information that of English to group syllables into word-like units infants rely on to postulate word boundaries in (Morgan and Saffran, 1995) and to remember fa- fluent speech. miliar sequences of syllables (Echols et al., 1997). Some of these studies have established that The ability to retrieve familiar words from fluent young American infants are sensitive to different speech was also found to depend on their stress kinds of potential word-boundary markers that are pattern. Indeed, Jusczyk et al. (1999b) found that language-specific: allophonic information (the fact infants begin segmenting strong–weak nouns (e.g., that the distribution of allophones within words is ‘‘doctor’’ and ‘‘candle’’) from fluent speech at 7.5 position-dependent), phonotactic information (the months, but begin segmenting weak–strong nouns fact that some but not all phonemic sequences are (e.g., ‘‘guitar’’ and ‘‘beret’’) only at 10.5 months. legal at the lexical level), and prosodic/metrical These authors suggested that this processing ad- information (the fact that lexical stress is predom- vantage of strong–weak words might result from inantly word initial in English). A sensitivity to the specification of the predominant stress pattern allophonic differences was found in infants as of English, and the emergence by 7.5 months of a young as 2 months of age (Hohne and Jusczyk, segmentation procedure, appropriate for English, 1994), as attested by their ability to discriminate and based on its metrical properties. Following between pairs such as ‘‘nitrate’’ and ‘‘night rate’’. this procedure, infants would place a word Infants have also been found to become sensitive to boundary before the occurrence of every strong phonotactic properties of their native language syllable in the speech stream, allowing for the de- between 6 and 9 months of age (Friederici and tection of strong–weak but not weak–strong Wessels, 1993; Jusczyk et al., 1993b, 1994; Mattys words. Note that this procedure is language spe- et al., 2001). This is shown by the emergence of a cific, as it would not be appropriate for the ac- preference for legal or frequent sequences of pho- quisition of French in which the metrical structure nemes in their native language with respect to ille- is different. 1 Later, that is between 7.5 and 10.5 gal or infrequent ones (e.g., the frequent and months, infants would become sensitive to the infrequent non-word sequences ‘‘chun’’ and (language-general) distributional properties of ‘‘yush’’). Last but not least, a preference for words syllables in the speech stream, which would then with the predominant English strong–weak stress allow them to segment weak–strong words by pattern (e.g., ‘‘porter’’) over less frequent weak– grouping these two syllables together. Note that strong words (e.g., ‘‘report’’) also emerges between further support that infants can use statistical these two ages (Jusczyk et al., 1993a; Turk et al., regularities in the order of syllables forming a 1995), revealing the emergence of a sensitivity to continuous sequence to build cohesive word-like native word stress patterns. units comes from a study by Saffran et al. (1996) Other studies have investigated whether, once on 8-month-old infants. they are sensitive to these language-specific Hence, the studies above provide good evidence markers, infants actually use them to infer word- that the very onset of word learning/segmentation like units. First, some studies showed that al- is under the influence of language-specific seg- though 9-month-old infants only use allophonic mentation procedures, particularly a procedure cues to locate familiar words in fluent speech when based on the prosodic/metrical properties of the they are guided by distributional cues, 10.5- month-old can rely on these sole allophonic cues (Jusczyk et al., 1999a). Moreover, a recent study 1 Unfortunately, it is not possible to specify the kind of has shown that the fact of providing infants with segmentation procedures developed by infants growing up in a French-speaking environment, given that at this point all the word-boundary phonotactic information helps studies on the emergence of speech segmentation were done them extract familiarized words from fluent speech with infants learning (American) English, with the exception of (Mattys and Jusczyk, 2001). one study with Dutch-learning infants (Kuijpers et al., 1998). T. Nazzi, F. Ramus / Speech Communication 41 (2003) 233–243 235 native language (the strong–weak segmentation Finally, adultsÕ segmentation procedures appear to procedure for English). At this point, and in spite be deeply embedded in their language-specific of its importance, this finding is problematic unless competence, and acquired at a very young age. This we explain how infants come to specify these is attested by the fact that the metrical procedure phonological properties of their native language. they use is determined by their native language ra- Indeed, if we are trying to explain how infants ther than by the language they are listening to: once come to start segmenting fluent speech, we cannot they have mastered a particular language, adults say that they use some ÔknowledgeÕ of the fact that rely on procedures appropriate to that language words are stressed initially in their language unless even when listening to a foreign language (Cutler we can explain how they discovered that fact in- et al., 1986; Otake et al., 1993). Moreover, it has dependently of segmentation: a classical boot- also been shown that even very proficient bilinguals strapping problem. In this paper, we propose the are dominant in one of their languages, and have existence of such an independent mechanism for developed specialized metrical segmentation pro- the acquisition of the metrical segmentation pro- cedures in only one of their languages (Cutler et al., cedure. This proposal was initially inspired by data 1992). from the adult speech segmentation literature and It has been suggested that each of the different the phonetic literature, which we review in the types of metrical segmentation procedures is op- following. Then, we propose a prosodic boot- timally adapted to the processing of a particular strapping account of the acquisition of the metri- rhythmic class of languages (Cutler and Mehler, cal segmentation procedures, and then turn to 1993; Otake et al., 1993; see also Sebastiaan-Gall ees recent data that we have started to gather in sup- et al., 1992; Vroomen et al., 1996), even if minor port of this proposal. processing differences can be found within a Several studies have looked at the way adults class.
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