American Infants’ Perception of Cues to Grammatical Units in Non- native Languages and Music: Evidence from Polish and Japanese

Introduction During the first year, infants are highly attuned to suprasegmental aspects of speech. This sensitivity may be exploited in the infant’s segmentation of the speech stream into clausal units. Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Wright Cassidy, Druss and Kennedy (1987) examined young infants’ sensitivity to the pauses and other suprasegmental cues that coincided with clausal boundaries by inserting artificial pauses at clause boundaries or clause-internally. They found that when the infants were presented with passages that either had pauses inserted at clause boundaries and passages that had pauses inserted clause-internally they preferred the passages that had pauses coincident with clausal boundaries. This was true even in low-pass filtered speech (Jusczyk, 1989), making it clear that infants were sensitive to suprasegmental cues and not segmental cues. The following studies examine this finding in more detail. They ask whether the sensitivity to the prosodic properties of the clause is language general or not. The Headturn Preference Procedure is used to examine young infants’ sensitivity to clausal units in languages with different prosodic and syntactic properties. The degree of tuning to the input language in the performance of these tasks is then assessed. In addition, infants’ performance with non-language stimuli is also assessed in order to ascertain which aspects of performance are linguistic in origin and which are more general properties of learning about auditory stimuli.