Infant Perception of Prosodic Boundaries Without the Pause Cue: An Eye-Tracking Study

Prosodic boundaries play a crucial role in signaling speech chunking, and may thus facilitate language learning. Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to prosodic boundaries and use them to segment speech. As prosodic boundary cues vary across languages, infants’ sensitivity to prosodic boundaries may also vary. The present study explores the perception of prosodic boundaries without the pause cue in European Portuguese 9- month-old infants. Using a familiarization procedure with visual fixation implemented with eye-tracking, infants were presented with sequences of delexicalized utterances with and without a prosodic boundary while watching a video with a randomly moving pattern. Successful discrimination was found, demonstrating that the pause is not a necessary cue by 9 months in line with the languagespecific adult pattern. Potential relations of discrimination abilities with later language outcomes are examined, and implications of our findings for crosslinguistic variation in the development of prosodic boundary perception are discussed.

, 2019