SEGMENTATION PROBLEMS, RHYTHMIC SOLUTIONS

The lexicon contains discrete entries, which must be located in speech input in order for speech to be understood; but the continuity of spe ech signals means that lexical access from spoken input involves a seg mentation problem for listeners. The speech environment of prelinguist ic infants may not provide special information to assist the infant li steners in solving this problem. Mature language users in possession o f a lexicon might be thought to be able to avoid explicit segmentation of speech by relying on information from successful lexical access; h owever, evidence from adult perceptual studies indicates that listener s do use explicit segmentation procedures. These procedures differ acr oss languages and seem to exploit language-specific rhythmic structure . Efficient as these procedures are, they may not have been developed in response to statistical properties of the input, because bilinguals , equally competent in two languages, apparently only possess one rhyt hmic segmentation procedure. The origin of rhythmic segmentation may t herefore lie in the infant's exploitation of rhythm to solve the segme ntation problem and gain a first toehold on lexical acquisition. Recen t evidence from speech production and perception studies with prelingu istic infants supports the claim that infants are sensitive to rhythmi c structure and its relationship to lexical segmentation.