Perception of Prosodic Boundary Correlates by Newborn Infants

Acquiring a lexicon requires segmenting the continuous speech stream into words (or morphemes). In previous work, we suggested that the speech stream may be spontaneously perceived as a string of prosodic units, roughly corresponding to phonological phrases (Christophe & Dupoux, 1996; Christophe, Guasti, Nespor, Dupoux, & van Ooyen, 1997). Phonological phrases typically contain one or two content words together with some function words (e.g., [the little boy] [is running fast]; see Nespor & Vogel, 1986, for a formal definition). Finding the actual word boundaries is significantly simplified if operating on prosodic units shorter than whole utterances. First, word boundaries that coincide with prosodic boundaries are given and need not be computed through other means. Second, knowledge of these word boundaries may help infants discover some of the language-specific properties of words in their language, such as the combination of phonemes that occur at boundaries (i.e., phonotactic regularities) or typical stress patterns. This INFANCY, 2(3), 385–394 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.