Leiden University Student Repository

Nota, Naomi (2016)

Cue weighing in infants’ rule learning: prosody versus structure

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

When infants have two possible rules that they can discover in an artificial language, a prosodic rule and a structure rule, which one do they discover and does this change with development? Prior studies on infants’ cue weighing suggest a preference for prosodic cues for eight-month-old infants, and a preference for structure for ten-month-old infants when segmenting speech. Using a Headturn Preference Procedure with adapted stimuli from Spierings and ten Cate (2014), we compared looking times for a prosody and structure test condition. We found condition did not have a significant effect on looking time. However, ten-month-old infants had significantly longer looking times compared to the eight-month-old infants. We also found a significant difference for gender, suggesting that female infants have a preference for a different cue to discover underlying language patterns than males.

language acquisition

headturn preference procedure

cue weighing

prosody

structure

statistical learning

rule learning

Author

Nota, Naomi

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Taal en Cognitie

Supervisors

Levelt, C.C.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en