Speech segmentation is modulated by peak alignment: Evidence from German 10-month-olds

In two headturn preference experiments, we tested whether German infants ' speech segmentation skills are sensitive to the position of the pitch peak relative to the stressed syllable. Specifically, we compared target words with medial-peak accents (where the pitch peak is aligned with the stressed syllable, i.e. H * accents) and early-peak accents (where the pitch peak is early with respect to the stressed syllable, i.e. H+L * accents). Such differences in accent type signal mostly pragmatic distinctions in German, such as the difference between contextually new and recoverable information. We familiarized infants with target words produced with one of the two intonation conditions; target words were embedded in sentences. We measured looking times to lists of trochaic part-words that were either embedded in the target words or were novel to them. Results showed a novelty effect only in the medial-peak condition, suggesting that German infants at 10 months of age are very sensitive to pitch information for segmenting running speech. Index Terms: speech segmentation, pitch, metrical prominence, headturn preference procedure, Germa