Much of what we know about the development of listeners' word segmentation strategies originates from the artificial language-learning literature. However, many artificial speech streams designed to study word segmentation lack a salient cue found in all natural languages: utterance boundaries. In this study, participants listened to a…

Past research has indicated that English-learning infants begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). More recent work has demonstrated, however, that 7.5-month-olds' segmentation abilities are severely limited. For example, the ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech reportedly does not appear until…

In a landmark study, Jusczyk and Aslin (1995 ) demonstrated that English-learning infants are able to segment words from continuous speech at 7.5 months of age. In the current study, we explored the possibility that infants segment words from the edges of utterances more readily than the middle of utterances. The same procedure was used as in…

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head-turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English- learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty-four 10.5-month-olds were familiarized…