UCLA

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that 7.5-month-olds can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until 13.5-16 months of age (11-months in some restricted cases). In Experiment 1, we test 8- and 11-month-olds' ability to segment vowel-initial words that immediately follow the frequently occurring function word 'the'. In two subsequent experiments we rule out the role of bottom-up cues such as phonotactics or allophonic variations in explaining these results. Our results indicate that the function word 'the' facilitates 11-month-olds' segmentation of vowel-initial words that appear sentence-medially.