title: Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis.
abstract: Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary. Study 2 assessed linguistic and cognitive skills at 4-6 years of age for children who had participated in segmentation studies as infants. Children who had been able to segment words from fluent speech scored higher on language measures, but not general IQ, as preschoolers. Results suggest that speech segmentation ability is an important prerequisite for successful language development, and they offer potential for developing measures to detect language impairment at an earlier age.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742, USA. rnewman@hesp.umd.edu
authors.forename: Rochelle
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Newman
authors.forename: Nan Bernstein
authors.initials: NB
authors.lastname: Ratner
authors.forename: Ann Marie
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Jusczyk
authors.forename: Peter W
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Jusczyk
authors.forename: Kathy Ayala
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Dow
mesh_terms: D001076:Aptitude; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D042241:Early Diagnosis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007223:Infant; D007360:Intelligence; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary