FLUENT WORD IDENTIFICATION IN FRENCH-LEARNING INFANTS

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Learning about words is central to learning about language. To learn about the meaning and properties of words, infants must be able to recover recognizable word shapes from the continuous speech that they hear. The difficulty of this task is readily apparent to anyone listening to speakers conversing in an unfamiliar language: what one hears is a babble lacking readily identifiable words. The development of word-shape recognition skills is prerequisite to further acquisition of language, but despite the fundamental importance of word segmentation and word- shape identification to communicative development, research has only recently begun to explicate the nature and development of requisite cognitive and perceptual capacities. One key, but as yet unexplored, question concerns how "bottom-up" perceptual strategies may be integrated with "top-down" linguistic knowledge in recognizing words. In French, a set of phenomena known as enchainement (the most prominent of which is liaison) prevents simple bottom-up identification of vowel-initial nouns, of which French contains a great number. Due to liaison and related phenomena, such words never occur in their 'naked' form, but occur only in combination with varying initial consonants. A series of studies investigating French-learning infants early abilities for recognizing familiar vowel-initial words in novel fluent speech contexts in proposed. Data from these studies will help to illuminate how top-down representations and bottom-up perceptual processes engaged in fluent word recognition are integrated with one another.