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Early word segmentation in infants acquiring Parisian French: task-dependent and dialect-specific aspects*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

THIERRY NAZZI ,
KARIMA MERSAD ,
MEGHA SUNDARA ,
GALINA IAKIMOVA  and
LINDA POLKA
THIERRY NAZZI*
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France and CNRS, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris, France
KARIMA MERSAD
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
MEGHA SUNDARA
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
GALINA IAKIMOVA
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
LINDA POLKA
Affiliation:
School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University
*
Address for correspondence: Thierry Nazzi, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Institut Pluridisciplinaire des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75006 Paris, France. tel: +33·1·42·86·43·15; fax: +33.1.42·86·33·22. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect has a cost. Infants were tested on standard European or Canadian French stimuli, in the word–passage or passage–word order. Our study first establishes an early onset of segmentation abilities: Parisian infants segment bisyllabic words at age 0;8 in the passage–word order only (revealing a robust order of presentation effect). Second, it shows that there are differences in segmentation abilities across Parisian and Canadian French infants, and that there is a cost for cross-dialect segmentation for Parisian infants. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding word segmentation processes.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 600 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was conducted with the support of an ANR grant # 07-BLAN-0014-01 to TN and a grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada to LP. Special thanks to the infants and their parents for their kindness and cooperation, Léo-Lyuki Nishibayashi for help with the testing, and James White for carefully proofreading the manuscript.

References

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