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1. Spanish input accelerates bilingual infants’ segmentation of English words

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104936  

   Mateu, Victoria E.; Sundara, M. (January 2022, Cognition)

   We asked whether increased exposure to iambs, two-syllable words with stress on the second syllable (e.g., guitar), by way of another language – Spanish – facilitates English learning infants' segmentation of iambs. Spanish has twice as many iambic words (40%) compared to English (20%). Using the Headturn Preference Procedure we tested bilingual Spanish and English learning 8-month-olds' ability to segment English iambs. Monolingual English learning infants succeed at this task only by 11 months. We showed that at 8 months, bilingual Spanish and English learning infants successfully segmented English iambs, and not simply the stressed syllable, unlike their monolingual English learning peers. At the same age, bilingual infants failed to segment Spanish iambs, just like their monolingual Spanish peers. These results cannot be explained by bilingual infants' reliance on transitional probability cues to segment words in both their native languages because statistical cues were comparable in the two languages. Instead, based on their accelerated development, we argue for autonomous but interdependent development of the two languages of bilingual infants. 

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2. Representations of Nonlocal Syntactic Dependencies Feed Verb Learning in Infancy

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.70207  

   Perkins, Laurel; Ying, Yuanfan; Williams, Alexander; Lidz, Jeffrey (July 2026, Developmental Science)

   ABSTRACT The ability to represent both local and nonlocal syntactic dependencies emerges in an infant's second year of life, raising questions about how these early syntactic representations interact with language learning in other domains. Usingwh‐questions as our case study, we investigate how infants’ syntactic dependency acquisition interacts with their early lexical development. Prior work finds that 18‐month‐olds represent frontedwh‐phrases as nonlocal arguments in objectwh‐questions with known verbs. Here, we show that 19–21‐month‐olds (range: 18;29–21;26) do the same when interpreting unknown verbs. We introduce a novel Violation of Fit method, a cross‐modal extension of the Violation of Expectations paradigm. Infants saw dialogues with novel verbs in objectwh‐questions (e.g.,What is the girl gonna gorp?), transitive polar questions (Is the girl gonna gorp the toy?), or intransitive polar questions(Is the girl gonna gorp?). At test, infants viewed a causal event (e.g., a girl knocks over a tower), and we measured their attention as an indication of whether they considered the verbs to be a good fit for this type of event. Across the age range, we found that infants who heardwh‐question dialogues attended similarly to the test events as infants who heard canonical transitive dialogues, and unlike infants who heard intransitive dialogues. Thus, 19–21‐month‐olds treat objectwh‐questions with a novel verb as transitive when relating them to scenes. This suggests that immediately afterwh‐dependency representations are first acquired, they are available to feed verb learning. SummaryWe find that 19–21‐month‐olds represent wh‐phrases (e.g.,what) as nonlocal objects in wh‐questions with unknown verbs (e.g.,What is the girl gonna gorp?).We introduce a novel experimental paradigm, Violation of Fit, which measures how well an infant considers a particular sentence to fit with a particular scene.This test reveals that infants treat object wh‐questions with a novel verb as transitive, and therefore a good fit to a causal event.This suggests that immediately after wh‐dependency representations are first acquired, they are available to feed verb learning. 

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3. Developmental change in English‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning

   https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12587  

   Quam, Carolyn; Swingley, Daniel (May 2024, Infancy)

   Abstract To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch‐contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time‐course with which English‐learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30‐month‐olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 24‐month‐olds, and 18‐month‐olds. The older two groups were tested using the language‐guided‐looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24‐month‐olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well—conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24 months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen‐month‐olds learned both pitch‐contrasted and vowel‐contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native‐language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). We contextualize our findings within other recent work in this area. 

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4. Limits of short-term perceptual training for enhancing Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of English lexical stress in spoken word recognition

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0026882  

   Tremblay, Annie C; Kim, Hyoju; Kim, Sahyang; Cho, Taehong (March 2024, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   This study investigates whether short-term perceptual training can enhance Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of English lexical stress in spoken word recognition. Unlike English, Seoul Korean does not have lexical stress (or lexical pitch accents/tones). Seoul-Korean speakers at a high-intermediate English proficiency completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment adapted from Connell et al. (2018) (pre-/post-test). The experiment tested whether pitch in the target stimulus (accented versus unaccented first syllable) and vowel quality in the lexical competitor (reduced versus full first vowel) modulated fixations to the target word (e.g., PARrot; ARson) over the competitor word (e.g., paRADE or PARish; arCHIVE or ARcade). In the training (eight 30-min sessions over eight days), participants heard English lexical-stress minimal pairs uttered by four talkers (high variability) or one talker (low variability), categorized them as noun (first-syllable stress) or verb (second-syllable stress), and received accuracy feedback. The results showed that neither training increased target-over-competitor fixation proportions. Crucially, the same training had been found to improve Seoul- Korean listeners’ recall of English words differing in lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2022) and their weighting of acoustic cues to English lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2023). These results suggest that short-term perceptual training has a limited effect on target-over-competitor word activation. 

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5. Computational Modeling of the Segmentation of Sentence Stimuli From an Infant Word‐Finding Study

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13427  

   Swingley, Daniel; Algayres, Robin (March 2024, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Computational models of infant word‐finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant‐directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies measuring infants' capacity for learning from spoken sentences. Correspondence with infant outcomes in such experiments is an appropriate benchmark for models of infants. We demonstrate such an analysis by applying the DP‐Parser model of Algayres and colleagues to auditory stimuli used in infant psycholinguistic experiments by Pelucchi and colleagues. The DP‐Parser model takes speech as input, and creates multiple overlapping embeddings from each utterance. Prospective words are identified as clusters of similar embedded segments. This allows segmentation of each utterance into possible words, using a dynamic programming method that maximizes the frequency of constituent segments. We show that DP‐Parse mimics American English learners' performance in extracting words from Italian sentences, favoring the segmentation of words with high syllabic transitional probability. This kind of computational analysis over actual stimuli from infant experiments may be helpful in tuning future models to match human performance. 

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