This paper investigates the acoustic properties of speech used by infant listeners to discover clauses in continuous speech. In a series of experiments using the Headturn Preference procedure, 6-month-old infants' use and weighting of prosodic cues in their segmentation of clauses in continuous speech was explored. The experiments sequentially…

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development ( Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically,…

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language-specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well-formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning…