| Abstract: | In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g.,birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns
and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized
Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions of six bisyllabic target nonwords. After exposure, the participants
were given a forced choice recognition test to judge which strings had been present in the input. Experiment 1 demonstrated
that English speakers used trochaic stress to isolate strings, despite being unfamiliar with Dutch phonotactics. Experiment
2 showed benefits from invariance introduced by affricates, which are typically found at onsets of final syllables in Dutch
diminutives. Together, the results demonstrate that diminutives contain prosodic and distributional features that are beneficial
for word segmentation. |
