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Chapter
8.1 Introduction
The previous chapter has shown how infants’ speech perception is shaped
by the developing phonological system and how this process leads to the
establishment of lexical representations and the processing of content
words. The present chapter will pursue the issue of the interactions
between innate processing capacities and the specific requirements of
the language to be learned with a special focus on crosslinguistic research
including the initial steps infants take to enter the particular morphosyn-
tactic system of the target language. Though there is an increasing body of
research on bilingual children in this area, this overview will be restricted
to studies with monolingual infants.
One of the fascinating questions of language acquisition research con-
cerns the nature of the interplay between the innate abilities the child
brings to solving the task of learning a language and the impact of the
different conditions of experience provided by the child’s exposure to one
or more language(s) and their specific structural features. Language acqui-
sition is a developmental process in which the target is subject to multiple
I thank Jürgen Weissenborn for his longstanding cooperation in our common research on the early acquisition of
function words and for his comments on an earlier version of this contribution. My research cited in this chapter was
supported by several grants from the German Science Foundation (DFG HO 1960/5-1/2; HO 1960/6-2; HO1960/8-1).
Last but not least I thank my colleagues from the Special Research Cluster Information Structure (SFB 632). The
opportunity for cooperative work within this framework sharpened my view on crosslinguistic variation and the necessity
of incorporating it into acquisition research.
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 161
experiments with very similar setups (Thiessen & Saffran 2003). This might
be the result of an interaction involving the complexity of the stimuli
presented and the child’s developmentally changing capacity to process
them, a capacity that has not yet been understood in its full complexity
(see Burnham & Dodd 1999, Houston-Price & Nakai 2004). Nevertheless,
according to the model by Hunter and Ames (1988), a phase of a familiarity
preference might be followed by a phase of novelty preference within one
single child across the trials of an experiment. This raises the problem in
determining novelty preferences, familiarity preferences or null effects
when listening times are averaged over all trials of an experimental ses-
sion. More recently, experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs; see
Chapter 4) have entered the research on language development in early
infancy. In the areas considered in this chapter, some studies on word
segmentation have used this technique, which does not depend on a
behavioural response by the infants and thus may be especially applicable
to studying young infants. However, due to brain and processing matura-
tion, ERP responses in infants do not necessarily mirror those found in
adults and understanding these differences is still a challenge.
Comparing the performance of children across languages is an enter-
prise that requires a high degree of methodological comparability of the
experiments with respect to the kind of stimuli, the age of the children and
the details of the experimental procedure. Our review will show that, so
far, only a few studies are genuinely crosslinguistic in this sense. However,
as most of the studies on early language acquisition have been conducted
with English-learning children, special attention will be paid to research
on languages that are different from English.
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 163
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 165
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 167
cue for iambic grouping, but Japanese 7- to 8-month-olds did not respond
to the durational cues – which is consistent with findings for Japanese
adults (Iversen et al. 2008). Taken together, the available data suggest that
pitch and intensity may already be used in accordance with the iambic–
trochaic law by rather young infants while the use of durational cues
seems to be subject to a longer developmental process and thus is a
stronger candidate for being a result of language exposure. However, the
earlier exploitation of intensity and pitch cues fits with the initial advan-
tage of segmenting trochaic words in English-learning infants as it should
be possible to identify their first strong syllable by these cues. So far,
however, the applicability of the iambic–trochaic law to the segmentation
of words from natural speech is unclear: all experiments reported used
sequences with manipulated acoustic cues in such a way that only dura-
tional, pitch or intensity variation was present. In natural language, a
coalition of acoustic cues which often includes duration is typically asso-
ciated with stressed syllables independently of their position (e.g. Sluitjer
& van Heuven 1996 for Dutch, Jessen, Marasek, Schneider & Clahßen 1995
for German, Klatt 1976 for English). Hence, it is possible that the predic-
tions made by the iambic–trochaic law are less suitable for word segment-
ing than for the segmentation of larger prosodic units (Nespor et al., 2008).
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Again, one could argue that making use of these properties calls for prior
computation of the phonotactic constraints or the phonotactic probabil-
ities of the ambient language and would require the previous segmenta-
tion of the relevant units like syllables or words. However, the sensitivity
of infants to these co-occurrence patterns may be based on their highly
efficient mechanisms for tracking transitional probabilities between adja-
cent segments, which by themselves seem to play a crucial role in segmen-
tation processes (Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996). These statistical learning
mechanisms may have the capacity to segment speech based only on the
computation of distributional properties of segments and syllables.
In addition to transitional probabilities across adjacent segments, more
recent research has provided evidence that infants even in their first year
of life can also track non-adjacent dependencies in their input (Friederici,
Mueller & Oberecker 2011, Gervain & Werker 2012). Non-adjacent depen-
dencies across consonants and vowels may also provide useful informa-
tion for segmentation processes. One instance is the typical order of
consonantal segments in words. The so-called labial coronal law describes
a bias found across many languages according to which the sequencing of
a labial followed by a coronal (e.g. bata) is more frequent in words than the
reversed order (e.g. taba). More recently it has been shown that the labial
coronal law also affects speech perception in young children. French
10-month-olds prefer to listen to words that follow the labial coronal
law compared to words with the reversed order of these consonants
(Gonzalez-Gomez & Nazzi 2012, Nazzi, Bertoncini & Bijeljac-Babic 2009).
Gonzalez-Gomez and Nazzi (2013) found that these non-adjacent phono-
tactic patterns also affect word segmentation: French 10-month-olds were
only successful in segmenting CVC words when the order of consonants
followed the labial coronal law and not when it was violated. At the age of
13 months the segmentation of words violating the law was still disadvan-
taged compared to that of words conforming to the law.
Less is known about the role of vowels in infants’ word segmentation.
Results from Italian adults suggest that non-adjacent dependencies across
vowels may be less important for word segmentation than the same type of
dependency across consonants (Toro, Nespor, Mehler & Bonatti 2008).
However, this effect may be language-specific as there is evidence that
adult speakers of languages that have vowel harmony make use of this cue
to segment their speech input (Suomi, McQueen & Cutler 1997). In a series
of experiments van Kampen, Parmaksiz, van de Vijver and Höhle (2008)
tested Turkish infants’ sensitivity to vowel harmony. In Turkish, all vowels
within one word have to belong to one and the same of two different
harmony classes based on the front–back distinction, with front vowels
forming one class and back vowels forming the other class (see Kabak &
Vogel 2001). If two syllables with vowels not belonging to the same har-
mony class appear in adjacent syllables, there is a very high probability
that there is a word boundary between the syllables. Van Kampen et al.
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 169
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occurrence (Shi, Morgan & Allopenna 1998) and infants’ known sensitivity
to frequently occurring strings in the signal, it can be assumed that the
first representations of these elements are established rather early during
language development and that these elements can then serve in a top-
down fashion as ‘anchor points’ (Valian & Coulson 1988) in infants’ sub-
sequent language processing and acquisition.
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The result pattern of the 8-month-olds was different. They showed longer
listening times to those nonsense words that had either been familiarized
with the or with kuh than to those familiarized with the lower-frequency
functor or its phonetic foil. This suggests that both age groups recognize
the higher-frequency functor as a familiar string in the input and therefore
seem to segment the string before the nonsense word, which facilitates the
recognition of the item in the test phase. While the phonological repre-
sentation of the higher frequency function word the seems to be already
quite specific for the 11-month-olds, it is still underspecified for the
8-month-olds, leading to the same results for the real and the nonce
function word.
Similar results were reported by Shi and Lepage (2008) for infants learn-
ing Canadian French. They familiarized 8-month-olds with sequences of
either the French indefinite plural determiner des or the first-person pos-
sessive pronoun mes or a nonsense syllable kes together with an infrequent
French noun. In the test phase infants were only presented with the
isolated nouns. The infants listened longer to those nouns that had been
familiarized with one of the existing function words than to the nouns that
had been presented with a preceding nonsense syllable during familiariza-
tion. To test for frequency effects of the functors used, Shi and Lepage ran a
second experiment in which the pronoun mes was replaced by the less
frequent second-person possessive pronoun vos. This form did not yield the
same effect that had been observed for the more frequent pronoun mes in
the first experiment.
The results from these three different languages converge in showing
that infants establish representations of free functional morphemes
throughout their first year of life and that these representations affect
their processing of speech and enhance the recognition of a following
element as an independent unit. The providing of boundary information
for the adjacent word and thereby the supporting of the segmentation of
the speech stream could be one of the sources of this facilitation effect.
Furthermore, the results suggest that the frequency of occurrence of these
functional morphemes is the relevant factor for their acquisition, as func-
tional morphemes with higher or lower frequency in the English and
French studies were different in their effects. That the German infants
seem to show a delay compared to the English and French infants may be
due to the much more complex article paradigm of German as compared
to both other languages. German has three gender classes and four case
categories, which are marked by six different forms of the singular definite
article (compared to two forms in French and one in English), and this
higher inventory must lead to a lower frequency of the individual forms of
the paradigm as compared to French or English. This facilitating effect of
high-frequency elements has not only been observed for functional mor-
phemes but also for other strings with a high frequency of occurrence in
the infants’ input, as for instance a child’s own name or the term used to
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 173
refer to the mother (for English: Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff & Rathbun,
2005; for French: Mersad & Nazzi 2012). Beyond this, Japanese and Italian
infants as young as 8 months of age have been shown to be sensitive to the
typical order of high- and low-frequency elements in their respective
language and to use this information in the segmentation of speech
(Gervain, Nespor, Mazuka, Horie & Mehler 2008), again supporting an
early accessibility of frequency information.
The results for German, French and English uniformly show that chil-
dren learning these languages process and establish a representation of
functional elements from early on, which, however, initially seems not to
be fully phonologically specified. Due to their high frequency, functional
elements may well be accessible to infants’ processing and learning
mechanisms, which have been proven to be highly proficient in comput-
ing frequency distributions of sound patterns (Jusczyk, Luce & Charles-
Luce 1994, Mattys & Jusczyk 2001a, Maye, Werker & Gerken 2002, Onishi,
Chambers & Fisher 2002, Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996). The crosslinguis-
tic comparison suggests that the acoustic salience of the realization of
functional elements in the speech stream does not make good predictions
about their acquisition. With respect to acoustics, English determiners
should be the least salient ones among the languages considered as they
are generally realized as unstressed syllables with schwa vowels. In German
determiners are unstressed as well, but the degree of vowel reduction is
generally lower than in English. In French the majority of determiners have
full vowels. If perceptual saliency as defined by these parameters deter-
mines the rate of acquisition, we would expect the English infants to be
the last in acquiring function words – an expectation that is contradicted by
the data. This raises the question as to whether stress is as crucial for infants’
speech processing as typically assumed (e.g. Bates & Goodman 1999,
Gleitman & Wanner 1982). So far, there is no empirical evidence supporting
the claim that infants have special problems in processing unstressed mate-
rial (Johnson 2005, Jusczyk & Thompson 1978). Adults’ disadvantages in the
processing of unstressed words might thus be the result of changing atten-
tional parameters (Cutler & Foss 1977, Cutler & Swinney 1987).
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 175
pseudowords and showed longer listening times for the stems that had
carried the -ing ending during the familiarization. Taken together, the
results of these experiments show that infants at the beginning of their
second year of life start to respond differently to affixes present in their
language as compared to nonsense syllables. Furthermore, they seem to
begin to recognize a relation between a word that carries an inflectional
ending and the corresponding word stem without this inflectional ending,
which is essential for building up morphological paradigms. The fact that
functional morphemes typically occur at the edges of words – either as
prefixes or suffixes – may make them suitable to function as word bound-
ary cues as well.
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 177
There are indications that word forms may contain phonological cues
that allow a more finely graded categorization within these broad classes,
e.g. the categorization into nouns and verbs (Durieux & Gillis 2000, Kelly
1996). Acoustic differences in the pitch and duration patterns of homo-
phonous nouns and verbs have been observed by Shi and Moisan (2008) for
French and by Conwell and Morgan (2012) for English child-directed
speech. English-learning 13-month-olds were also able to discriminate
between homophonous nouns and verbs spliced out from child-directed
spontaneous speech, suggesting that they are sensitive to the relevant
acoustic differences (Conwell & Morgan 2012). But so far, there is no
clear empirical evidence that children in the age range considered here
use these cues to distinguish nouns and verbs as syntactically different
categories and use phonological cues to assign new words to one of these
categories.
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178 BARBARA HÖHLE
object and sibbing to a presented action – a finding that has been verified by
a number of more recent studies with toddlers (Eyer et al. 2002, Gelman &
Markman 1985, Taylor & Gelman 1988) and with even younger children
(Bernal, Lidz, Millotte & Christophe 2007, Echols & Marti 2004, Katz,
Baker & Macnamara 1974, Waxman & Booth 2001, 2003).
A study with German learners suggests that the morphosyntactic envir-
onment not only helps the child to find a referent for a new word but that
the new word is assigned to a syntactic category with specific distribu-
tional properties. Höhle, Weissenborn, Kiefer, Schulz and Schmitz (2004)
presented 15-month-olds with noun phrases consisting of the German
indefinite article and a new pseudoword (ein pronk ‘a pronk’). After famil-
iarizing infants with these noun phrases the new word was presented in
sentences within another syntactic environment, either constituting
another frame for the noun use of the word (e.g. dieser pronk ‘this pronk’)
or constituting a frame for the verb use of the same new word (e.g. sie
pronk1 ‘she pronk’). The children showed a listening preference for the use
of the new word in the verb context, suggesting a novelty effect for the
ungrammatical structure. These results suggest that German learners
use the appearance of a determiner before an unknown word to assign
the new word to a syntactic category that we would call nouns. The fact
that they accept the use of the new word in environments that are lexically
different from but syntactically identical to the environment in which the
word had occurred before shows that children as young as 15 months have
some generalized knowledge about the syntactic features of at least some
syntactic classes and do not generally exploit syntactic knowledge in an
item-by-item fashion (Tomasello 2000b, Chapter 5).
Shi and Melançon (2010) found a similar asymmetry between noun and
verb categorization in French-learning 14-month-olds although they used
a task that was less challenging. Like Höhle et al. they familiarized infants
with sequences of either a French determiner and a pseudoword (e.g. ton
crale ‘your crale’) or of a French pronoun and a pseudoword (e.g. il mige ‘he
mige(s)’). In the test phase, the familiarized pseudoword was then com-
bined either with another determiner or with another pronoun either
from the same syntactic category (e.g. le crale ‘the crale’) or from the
other one (e.g. tu crale ‘you crale’). Only those infants who were familiar-
ized with the determiner/pseudoword combination responded to this
manipulation: they showed longer listening times to the pronoun/pseudo-
word combination than to the new determiner/pseudoword combination.
These findings mirror those obtained with the German children and
1
Note that the use of the new word as a verb form does not necessarily require the adding of an inflectional ending in
German. Furthermore, a replication of the experiment using a new pseudoword form that could also be an
inflected verb form (e.g. melt) yielded the same results. It is important for the interpretation of the results that a group of
infants familiarized with a pronoun context (er pronk – ‘he pronk’) and presented with the same sentences during
testing did not show the same effect.
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 179
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Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization 181
However, the results suggest that rather young infants have the capacity
to reconstruct morphological paradigms based on grammatical gender
categories even if this category is not relevant in the language they are
learning.
Our overview has shown that languages provide a number of cues that may
support infants’ initial steps into the segmentation and the syntactic
categorization of words in their ambient language. Furthermore, infants
seem to become attuned to the specific properties of their language rather
fast and start to exploit those cues that are informative in their language
quickly. In a nutshell, there might be two kinds of information that are
especially relevant for the early steps of young children into language
acquisition, namely rhythmic information and distributional information,
both of which operate on different linguistic levels including the pho-
neme, the syllable and the word. But, again, evidence for infants’ exploita-
tion of this kind of information stems from experiments with highly
controlled stimuli and it is unclear whether they can cope with the varia-
bility that characterizes natural speech (Johnson & Tyler 2010).
Several studies have raised the question of whether there is a dominance
relation between rhythmical and segmental distributional cues in that one
type of cue is used earlier or weighted over the other by young children
and whether there is a developmental change concerning the weighting
of these cues across age (Johnson & Jusczyk 2001, Mattys et al. 1999,
Thiessen & Saffran 2003). The use of distributional cues seems to be less
dependent on language-specific properties, but the evidence for the exploi-
tation of distributional cues comes mostly from highly controlled and
restricted experimental conditions; hence, their suitability for processing
the variability that is provided by the exposure to natural language has
been questioned (Johnson & Tyler 2010). So far, the research on the exploi-
tation of these cues in solving basic problems in language acquisition has
mostly focused on a single cue or a combination of a few cues for segmen-
tation and categorization. This is an appropriate approach if the question
as to whether infants can make use of specific kinds of information is in
the foreground. However, exposure to natural language in situations of
social interaction provides the infant with a whole range of different cues
in parallel, such as intonational cues for boundaries of larger prosodic
units that coincide with word boundaries (Gout, Christophe & Morgan
2004, Shukla, Nespor & Mehler 2007, Shukla, White & Aslin 2011) or
specific characteristics of infant-directed speech (Johnson, Seidl & Tyler
2014, Thiessen, Hill & Saffran 2005). Accordingly, research on how these
different sources of information interact in their exploitation by the child
is a further challenge for future research.
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