de la Cruz-Pavía, I. 1 , Elordieta, G. 2 , Gervain, J. 3 , Sebastián-Gallés, N. 4 & Laka, I. 2
1 University of British Columbia, Canada
2 University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain
3 CNRS-Université Paris Descartes, France
4 Brain and Cognition Unit, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
In two artificial language learning experiments, we explored the segmentation preferences of Basque/Spanish adult bilinguals to determine (a) whether bilinguals can deploy the frequency-based and prosodic segmentation strategies of their two languages, (b) what the relative weight ascribed to each of these cues is when presented in conflict, and (c) whether manipulating the language of the experiment (context language) modulates segmentation (de la Cruz-Pavía et al. 2014). Two specific types of statistical and prosodic cues have been proposed as potentially allowing infants to segment speech into phrases and bootstrap acquisition of basic word order (VO/OV): (a) the frequency distribution of functional and lexical categories, and (b) the relative prominence within phonological phrases. (Gervain et al. 2008, Bernard&Gervain 2012). We seek to determine whether the cues used by infants in the initial stages of language acquisition are still available to adults when confronting a new language.
Results revealed that: (a) frequency- and prosody-based cues are available but not heavily weighed by adult speakers, who rely more heavily on prosodic cues than on statistical ones, (b) Basque/Spanish bilinguals can deploy the frequency-based and prosodic segmentation strategies of their two languages, and (c) manipulating the context language modulates the bilinguals' segmentation preferences.