Connecting Cues: Overlapping Regularities Support Cue Discovery in Infancy

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which syllable-level transitional probabilities and an overlapping novel cue served as cues to word boundaries. Infants' behavior at test indicated that they were able to discover the novel cue. Additional experiments showed that infants did not have a preexisting preference for specific test items and that transitional probability information was necessary to acquire the novel cue. Results suggest one way learners can discover relevant linguistic structure amid the multiple overlapping properties of natural language.