Early acquisition of word stress: a cross-linguistic infant study
Brigitta Keij & René Kager
UiL-OTS, Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
According to the Metrical Segmentation Hypothesis (Cutler & Norris 1988), metrical structure is usedby infants to segment words from the speech stream. However, the evidence for this hypothesis
comes mainly from initial stress languages (Höhle et al. 2009). Consequently, it is unknown how
language-specific this hypothesis is and a cross-linguistic approach should be adopted to tackle thisissue (Nazzi et al. 2006). Infants learning metrically opposed languages, namely infants learning Dutch(initial/ pre-final stress) and infants learning Turkish (final stress), are tested. In order to use metricalcues for word segmentation, infants first have to build a representation of the metrical structure of
their native language. Therefore, we test the emergence of rhythmic preference in Dutch- andTurkish-learning infants during the first year of life.
Instead of using the traditional head turn preference procedure, an innovative preferential
listening paradigm using eye tracking is employed to test the emergence of rhythmic preferences. The
research question is: do Dutch- and Turkish-learning infants show a language-specific rhythmic
preference and at what age does this preference appear? In total, 90 Dutch-learning and 90 Turkishlearning infants aged 4, 6 and 8 months have been tested. The first results of the Dutch-learning
infants showed that they do not present a rhythmic preference at 4 months of age, but that they doshow a language-specific rhythmic preference at 6 months of age.
However, since there was no interaction between the factors stress pattern and age, wecannot yet speak of a development between 4 and 6 months. Therefore we tested an additionalgroup of Dutch-learning 8-month-olds and also included this older age group in the Turkish study.
These ‘fresh off the shelf’-results will be presented in this paper and will give us more insight into thedevelopment during the first year of life, as well as allow us to interpret the results in a crosslinguistic perspective.

References
Cutler, Anne & Dennis Norris (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal ofExperimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, 113-121.
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Herolda, B., Weissenborn, J. & Nazzi, T. (2009). Language specific prosodic
preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants. Infant Behavior andDevelopment 32, 262-274.
Nazzi, T., Iakimova, G., Bertoncini, J., Frédonie, S. & Alcantara, C. (2006). Early segmentation of fluent speech byinfants acquiring French: Emerging evidence for cross linguistic differences. Journal of Memory andLanguage 54, 283–299.

Language-general prelexical basis of the labial-coronal perceptual asymmetry:evidence from Dutch and Japanese infants
Sho Tsuji 1,2, Reiko Mazuka 3,4, Alejandrina Cristia 5, & Paula Fikkert 1
1Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) 2 IMPRS for Language Sciences 3 RIKEN
Brain Sciences Institute (Japan) 4 Duke University (USA) 5 LSCP, CNRS (France)
Coronals have a special status in many phonological systems, and it is often assumed they have anunmarked or underspecified place of articulation (Paradis & Prunet, 1991). This special phonologicalstatus has typically been associated with lexical underspecification. This is reflected in perceptualasymmetries, such as the detection of a labial that is mispronounced as a coronal, but not a coronalthat is mispronounced as a labial, by both children (Fikkert, 2010) and adults (Lahiri & Reetz, 2010).

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Interestingly, a comparable perceptual asymmetry has recently been reported in six‐month‐old
infants for the contrast /paan/‐/taan/ (Dijkstra & Fikkert, 2011). As infants at this age are generally
considered 'universal listeners' (e.g., Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971), this suggests a
prelexical basis, at least for the labial-coronal perceptual asymmetry.
As prelexical does not necessarily equal pre-experience, a crucial open question remains if
the observed asymmetry is language‐specific, or rather general across languages. The current project
therefore compares the perception of the contrast in the word‐medial consonant cluster/ompa/‐/onta/ in Dutch and Japanese.
At present, 16 four‐month‐old and 16 six‐month‐old Dutch infants, as well as 13
four‐month‐old and 16 six‐month‐old Japanese infants were assessed on their discrimination of thecontrast in the word‐medial consonant clusters of the non‐words /ompa/‐/onta/. Eight tokens ofeach /ompa/ and /onta/, recorded by a native speaker of Dutch, were chosen as stimuli. In a slightly
modified version of the Central Fixation paradigm (Werker et al., 1998), half of the infants werehabituated to tokens of /ompa/, whereas the other half were habituated to /onta/, while they
fixated on a central screen. Both groups were then presented with new /ompa/ and /onta/ tokens,
while the visual stimuli remained unchanged. The test /onta/ constituted a 'switch' for the/ompa/‐habituated infants, whereas it mapped onto the 'same' category for the /onta/ infants, andvice versa. A mixed ANOVA revealed that infants looked longer to ‘switch’ trials *F(1,53) = 6.27, p =0.015], but that this effect interacted with the type of habituation stimulus [F (1,53)= 8.93, p =0.004]. Infants increased their looks during switch trials when habituated to /ompa/ (p < .001), but
not when habituated to /onta/ (p = .649). Neither the between‐subject factors language and age nor
any interactions between them reached significance, suggesting that infants across languages andage groups find it harder to hear a switch from coronal to labial than vice versa (Figure 1).
This work provides support for a prelexical and language‐independent basis of thelabial‐coronal asymmetry, contributing an important piece to the puzzle of the etiology of the special
status of coronals in the phonologies of the world.

FiguresFigure 1. Infants’ looking times (s) to same and switch trials by stimulus presentation order andlanguage. Upper (orange) row represents Dutch infants, lower (blue) row represents Japanese.

54References
Dijkstra, N. and P. Fikkert (2011). 'Universal constraints on the discrimination of Place of Articulation?
Asymmetries in the discrimination of 'paan' and 'taan' by 6‐month‐old Dutch infants'. In: Nick Danis,
Kate Mesh, and Hyunsuk Sung (Eds.), Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language
Development 35, 170‐182. infants.
Eimas, P.D., Siqueland, E.R., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in Science, 171(3968), 303‐306.
ton.
Fikkert, P. (2010). 'Developing representations and the emergence of phonology: evidence from perception andproduction'. Laboratory Phonology 10. Berlin: Moun
Lahiri, A., & Reetz, H. (2010). Distinctive features: Phonological underspecification in representation andprocessing. Journal of Phonetics ,38(1), 44‐59.
Paradis, C., & Prunet, J.‐F. (eds.) (1991). The special status of coronals: internal and external evidence.
(Phonetics and Phonology 2). San Diego: Academic Press. Werker, J.
F., Cohen, L. B., Lloyd, V. L., Casasola, M., Stager, C. L. (1998). Acquisition of word–object associations by14‐month‐old infants. Developmental Psychology, 34(6), 1289‐1309.

Two-to-three-month olds’ mismatch responses reveal fast distributional learningand perceptual bias
Karin Wanrooij 1, Paul Boersma 1, & Titia van Zuijen 2
1
Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam (TheNetherlands) 2 Department of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam(The Netherlands)
An important mechanism for learning speech sounds in the first year of life is ‘distributional learning’,i.e., learning by simply listening to the frequency distributions of the speech sounds in theenvironment. In the lab, where exposure to speech sound distributions typically lasts only a few
minutes, distributional learning has been reported for infants of four months and older.1,2,3,4,5 The
present study examined whether such fast distributional learning can also be demonstrated before
this age.
Two-to-three-month-old Dutch infants were presented with either a unimodal or a bimodal
vowel distribution based on the English /ε/~/æ/ contrast, for only twelve minutes. Subsequently,
mismatch responses (MMRs) were measured in an oddball paradigm, where one half of the infants ineach group heard a representative [ε] as the standard and a representative [æ] as the deviant, andthe other half heard the opposite pattern.
The results disclosed a larger MMR for bimodally trained infants than for unimodally trained
infants, thus extending an effect of distributional learning found in previous behavioral research to ayounger age group and a new method (MMRs as measured from event-related potentials in theelectroencephalogram). Moreover, the results revealed a robust interaction between the distribution(unimodal vs. bimodal) and the identity of the standard stimulus ([ε] vs. [æ]), which provides direct
evidence for an interplay between an asymmetry in vowel perception6 and distributional learning.
These results were obtained when infants were awake, drowsy or in active sleep during the test;when infants were in quiet sleep there was no effect of distributional learning or perceptual bias.

References
1. Capel, D.J.H., Bree, E.H. de, Klerk, M.A. de, Kerkhoff, A.O. & Wijnen, F.N.K. (2011). Distributional cues affectphonetic discrimination in Dutch infants. In Zonneveld, W., Quené, H. & Heeren, W. (Eds.), Sound andsounds. Studies presented to M.E.H (Bert) Schouten on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Utrecht: UiLOTS.
2. Cristià, A., McGuire, G.L., Seidl, A., & Francis, A.L. (2011). Effects of the distribution of acoustic cues on
infants’ perception of sibilants. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 388-402.

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