Jenny Saffran University of Wisconsin Madison

Erik Thiessen Carnegie Mellon University

In order to successfully acquire language, infants must flexibly adapt their learning strategies to best fit the structure of the linguistic input they receive. While some learning strategies are likely applicable widely across languages, such as detecting the sequential probabilities of sounds, other learning strategies need to be tailored to particular native language structures, such as discovering word boundaries using lexical stress cues. We will review a series of studies examining how infants learn how to learn word boundary cues like lexical stress as a function of linguistic experience.

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