Severino, C. 1 , Christophe, A. 2 , Vigário, M. 1 & Frota, S. 1
1 Lisbon Baby Lab, Centro de Linguística, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
2 Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Departement d'Etudes Cognitives,École normale superieure - PSL Research University, Paris, France
Recent research has addressed the role of phrasal prosody in early word segmentation, focusing on the contrast between words at the edge and the middle of the utterance, and reporting an effect of utterance edge as early as 6 months, due to its prosodic saliency (Seidl & Johnson, 2006; Johnson et al., 2014). This study revisits infant word segmentation beyond the edge factor. The ability to extract monosyllabic targets in two different utterance-internal prosodic conditions was examined in European Portuguese: target next to an Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary without a pause and target next to a Prosodic Word (PW) boundary. Both IP and PW edges are marked by clear (albeit different) prosodic cues in European Portuguese.
Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm (Altvader-Mackensen & Mani, 2013), 12-month olds (N=20 per group) were able to segment words in utterance-internal position when at the IP-edge, even without the pause cue, but not when just a PW-edge followed. These results show that segmentation abilities in utterance-internal position rely on the location of the word in the prosodic structure, initially occurring when the target is aligned with a high-level phrasal boundary. Prosodic structure thus facilitates word segmentation, beyond the utterance edge.