Cognition (in press)
Stress changes the representational landscape: Evidence from word segmentation
Suzanne Curtin
Toben H. Mintz
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants
are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native
language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes
infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether
stress is merely a cue to help organize the patterns of speech or
whether it is an important part of the representation of speech sound
sequences has still to be explored. Building on research in the areas
of infant speech perception and segmentation, we asked how several
months of exposure to the target language shapes infants' speech
processing biases with respect to lexical stress. We hypothesize that
infants represent stressed and unstressed syllables differently, and
employed analyses of child-directed speech to show how this change to
the representational landscape results in better distribution-based
word segmentation as well as an advantage for stress-initial syllable
sequences. A series of experiments then tested 9- and 7-month-old
infants on their ability to use lexical stress without any other cues
present to parse sequences from an artificial language. We found that
infants adopted a stress-initial syllable strategy and that they appear
to encode stress information as part of their proto-lexical
representations. Together, the results of these studies suggest that
stress information in the ambient language not only shapes how
statistics are calculated over the speech input, but that it is also
encoded in the representations of parsed speech sequences.Click to request a copy of this paper.
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