title: Early word segmentation in infants acquiring Parisian French: task-dependent and dialect-specific aspects.
abstract: Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect has a cost. Infants were tested on standard European or Canadian French stimuli, in the word-passage or passage-word order. Our study first establishes an early onset of segmentation abilities: Parisian infants segment bisyllabic words at age 0;8 in the passage-word order only (revealing a robust order of presentation effect). Second, it shows that there are differences in segmentation abilities across Parisian and Canadian French infants, and that there is a cost for cross-dialect segmentation for Parisian infants. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding word segmentation processes.
authors: Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France and CNRS, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris, France.
authors: Thierry
authors: T
authors: Nazzi
authors: Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.
authors: Karima
authors: K
authors: Mersad
authors: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA.
authors: Megha
authors: M
authors: Sundara
authors: Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.
authors: Galina
authors: G
authors: Iakimova
authors: School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University.
authors: Linda
authors: L
authors: Polka
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary