Brain potentials for word segmentation at seven months predict later language development

A lexicon maps words to concepts. For infants starting to acquire a lexicon, successfully mapping between word and concept requires not only being able to identify the concept, but crucially, also being able to identify the word. This is not as easy as it seems, since infants mainly hear multi-word utterances, with pauses in the speech signal not corresponding reliably to word onsets. Hence, the ability to segment words from speech is vital for vocabulary acquisition