Presentation: Sally
Summary: Yu-chiao
The study aimed to examine the process of first
language acquisition for English speakers, especially the part pertaining to
utterance segmentation. In order to prove the significance of predominant
stress patterns (i.e. strong/weak stress patterns) in the native language
development, the author conducted three relevant experiments. The first
experiment recruited 24 infants of approximately 9 months of age
(12 males and 12 females). Two types of word lists, each of which containing 12
items of the same stress patterns (weak/strong or strong/weak) and having an
average duration of 14.85 sec or 14.65 sec, were recorded and displayed with
loudspeakers in two opposite directions. The average times of the infants
orienting to the loudspeaker were 5.43 sec for the weak/strong lists and 7.45
sec for the strong/weak lists, which indicated the 9-month-old American infants
had developed some sensitivity to the dominant English stress patterns. In the
second experiment, 24 6-month-old infants (15 males and 9 females) were tested
as in the previous trial. The average looking times for the weak/strong and
strong/ weak patterns were 7.68 sec and 7.69 sec, respectively, implying no
preference for any stress pattern of the 6-month-old infants. The result
supported a developmental trend in recognition of the predominant stress
pattern of the native language. The last experiment was organized similarly, only
with all the stimulus materials being low-pass filtered, so that possible cues
provided by phonetic and phonotactic structures could be reduced or eliminated.
The average looking times of 24 9-month-old infants (15 males and 9 females)
were 7.37 sec and 8.25 sec for the weak/strong and strong/weak patterns,
respectively. The present study showed that infants were learning characteristic
patterns in the sound structure of their native language during the latter half
of the first year of life.
