title: British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli.
abstract: The word segmentation paradigm originally designed by Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) has been widely used to examine how infants from the age of 7.5 months can extract novel words from continuous speech. Here we report a series of 13 studies conducted independently in two British laboratories, showing that British English-learning infants aged 8-10.5 months fail to show evidence of word segmentation when tested in this paradigm. In only one study did we find evidence of word segmentation at 10.5 months, when we used an exaggerated infant-directed speech style. We discuss the impact of variations in infant-directed style within and across languages in the course of language acquisition.
authors.affiliation: Plymouth University, UK. Electronic address: caroline.floccia@plymouth.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Floccia
authors.affiliation: University of York, UK.
authors.forename: Tamar
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Keren-Portnoy
authors.affiliation: James Madison University, USA.
authors.forename: Rory
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: DePaolis
authors.affiliation: University of Warwick, UK.
authors.forename: Hester
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Duffy
authors.affiliation: University of Essex, UK.
authors.forename: Claire
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Delle Luche
authors.affiliation: International Centre for Language and Communicative development (LuCiD), University of Liverpool, UK.
authors.forename: Samantha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Durrant
authors.affiliation: Plymouth University, UK.
authors.forename: Laurence
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: White
authors.affiliation: Plymouth University, UK.
authors.forename: Jeremy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Goslin
authors.affiliation: University of York, UK.
authors.forename: Marilyn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vihman
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006113:United Kingdom
keywords: British English; Infant-directed-speech; Infants; Replication; Word segmentation