Discovering Words

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From apple to zigzag and from 1 to 10, Neepin Auger’s books for children will be certain to educate and entertain preschoolers, parents and teachers alike.

Top: an excerpt of the iambic familiarization stream used in Experiment 1B; capitalized syllables represent stress. The abbreviated form of ‘cinematograph’, this word is an anglicisation of the French cinématographe, the word used by the brothers Lumière to describe their invention in 1896. If so, infants should segment different items from the trochaic segmentation stream than from the iambic segmentation stream, and show a different pattern of preference at test after exposure to these two languages. Indeed, German-learning infants have been found to use lexical stress as a cue to word segmentation by 6 months ( Höhle et al. The additional three infants were excluded for crying during the testing session (1), average looking times of less than 3.The fact that they successfully segmented raises the possibility that word segmentation may begin at younger ages than previously thought in native language environments. In Experiment 2, we will investigate whether infants in this age range are capable of learning to use lexical stress as a cue to word segmentation. Instead, this would suggest that language-specific prosodic cues may be the earliest cue infants use to segment words from fluent speech.

The dia- prefix, meaning ‘through’, also appears in ‘diagram’, ‘dialect’, ‘diaphragm’ and ‘diarrhoea’.Whereas conditional learning results in the segmentation of a discrete item from a larger continuous array of stimuli (such as words from a sentence), distributional learning results in a combination of information from multiple stimuli into a central tendency or prototypical configuration (e. suggest that 6 months is below the age at which infants are able to segment words from fluent speech via conditional statistical cues. Further, they are able to learn a trochaic bias through exposure to a set of words that follow a consistent trochaic pattern. In addition to the English words presented, the French and Cree equivalents are also given, making these some of the most dynamic and useful board books on the market, perfectly suitable for the classroom, library, and nursery. For example, if infants extract the words BAby, DIAper, and SHOE, there is no consistent phonemic information.

When exposed to a stream of syllables, English-learning infants and English-speaking adults treat the stressed syllables as word onsets (e.These models predict that after exposure to speech, participants should have extracted a set of candidate lexical items (e. Neepin’s titles for children include Discovering Animals: English * French * Cree, Discovering Numbers: English * French * Cree, Discovering People: English * French * Cree, and Discovering Words: English * French * Cree.

e., words), and syllable groups with low conditional relations, such as groupings that occur across word boundaries (e. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.These cues are likely to work together in natural languages, but an open developmental question is which is available to infants earlier in development. Moreover, despite their success at segmenting on the basis of statistical cues, 5-month-old infants do not appear to have developed a trochaic bias.