Infants’ developing lexicon

During the first year of life, infants develop word segmentation capacities and start storing segmented word candidates in a ‘protolexicon’. Previously, we showed that their sensitivity to statistical information leads them to include in this protolexicon frequently occurring non-word strings in addition to real words.

Infants' acquisition of word segmentation

Words are a central building block of language, and segmenting words out of continuous speech is a challenging step in early language acquisition. Indeed, in spoken language there is no acoustic equivalent to the spaces that separate words in written language: spoken words are not separated by pauses. Infants start developing word segmentation abilities during the first year of life, relying on their sensitivity to both phonological and syllable co-occurrence cues to word boundaries.

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