May 23
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Jusczyk:1999
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p326 "... it appears that stress-based and statistical cues are
available earlier for English learners than are phonotactic and
allophonic cues"

Could it also be that stress-based cues are more salient than
allophonic cues and thus more useful for segmentation? I don't know
much about the acoustic characteristics of stressed syllables but if
they are a bit longer or louder then the unstressed, this might be
more easily noticeable than an allophonic change. Changing the stress
patterns in words in can sometimes even change meaning or make the
word 'invalid', which might be more important information to the
English learning infant than an allophonic change which doesn't change
word meaning.

To what extent is an infant's ability to segment words influenced by
the quantity of linguistic input versus the maturation of specific
brain regions? Can increasing the amount of linguistic exposure
accelerate an infant's ability to recognize words within fluent
speech?

What are some of the other cues involved in meaning extraction?
(other than word segmentation)

How effective is the observation and conclusion in terms of the
reaction time and age timeline when the speech is presented to infants
in a noisy environment? This is more natural in than the ideal lab
setup.

According to the paper, the stress pattern of a language serves as an
important cue concerning the segmentation of words. How does the
bilingual acquisition of two languages that exhibit different stress
patterns (e.g. English (trochaic) vs. French (iambic)) affect the
ability of a child to segment words?

It was mentioned in the paper that there is evidence suggesting that
segmentation abilities contribute to the development of a lexicon, but
it was not directly clear to me, how (from the study described) this
conclusion can be drawn.

(Relevant passage: "Finally, a subsequent investigation suggests that
these segmentation abilities contribute to the development of a
lexicon. Houston et al. found that 7.5-month-old infants, familiarized
with target words on one day and tested 24h later, listen longer to
passages with the targets than to ones without them. Hence, infants
appear to encode information into memory about the sound patterns of
words that occur frequently in speech directed to them.")

How might the developmental sequence of word segmentation strategies
differ for infants learning languages with different sound structures
and stress patterns? What impact would the specific features of a
language have on the process of word segmentation in infants?

"Although an earlier investigation had shown that two-month-old
infants can discriminate the allophonic differences between nitrates
and night rates, nine-month-old infants gave no indication of using
this information to locate the familiarized target word in the
passages. Hence, nine-month-old infants familiarized with nitrates
listened equally long to the test passage with night rates as they did
to the one with nitrates."

Does that mean that they need to develop other skills as well in order
to show sensitivity to the distribution of allophonic cues between
words? Since they seem to distinguish the allophonic differences at
some level, why couldn't the nine-month-old infants use this ability
to locate the familiarized target word?