Abstract
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary. We compare these results with similar results obtained with English-speaking infants, and discuss their implication for lexical and syntactic acquisition.
How to Cite
Millotte, S., Morgan, J., Margules, S., Bernal, S., Dutat, M. & Christophe, A., (2011) “Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 10(1), 67-86. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.101
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