Boll-Avetisyan, N. , Fritzsche, T. & Jäkel, C.
Universität Potsdam
Prior research suggests that infants' ability to segment words from continuous speech is, at first, restricted to consonant-initial words. In English, vowel-initial words are not segmented before the age of 13.5 months (Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001; Nazzi et al. 2006) unless they occur in phrase-initial or phrase-final position (Seidl & Johnson, 2008). The present study investigates the effect of input language on this development. We focused on German, which also has few but relatively more vowel-initial words than English. Using a HPP setup, we tested 40 German-learning 11-month-olds. Each infant was familiarized with different tokens of either a vowel-initial (e.g., uger) or consonant-initial nonword (e.g., luger). At test, all infants heard the same two types of text passages (composed of only nonwords), one of which contained the familiarized target embedded in a nonword carrier (e.g., tiluger). Results revealed that infants preferred passages containing the familiarized target (p < .05) without an influence of the familiarization (vowel- or consonant-initial) and no interactions. This suggests that German-learning infants segment vowel-initial words at an earlier age than English-learning infants. The study highlights the relevance of cross-linguistic comparisons of infant behavior and input characteristics for gaining a better understanding of early language acquisition mechanisms.