UCL Speech Science Forum
24 February 2016, 4pm, G10
Testing for infants’ knowledge of vowel phonotactics
Claire Delle Luche
Abstract
Phonotactics are a useful cue for efficient word segmentation. Research has
evidenced infants at 9 months use consonant phonotactics at word onsets and
offsets, but vowel phonotactics would be a useful cue as well. We tested British
English infants on their knowledge of the lax vowel constraint, and found that not
only do they know this constraint, but they do earlier than the earliest evidence of
consonant phonotactics.