To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms. We explore whether the capacity to access low-frequency phonotactic combinations is available at 9 months when pre-exposed to wordforms containing statistically low combinations of segments. Using a modified head-turn procedure, one group of infants was presented with nonwords with low-frequency complex onsets (dr-), and another group was presented with zero-frequency onset nonwords (dl-). Following pre-exposure and familiarization, infants were then tested on their ability to segment nonwords that contained either the low- or the zero-frequency onsets. Only infants in the low-frequency condition were successful at the task, suggesting some experience with these onsets supports segmentation.

中文翻译：

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提高输入：9 个月大的孩子对新词形式中的低频音标模式的敏感性

为了学习他们的第一个单词，婴儿必须注意表示单词边界的各种线索。婴儿可能会使用的一种此类提示是特定于语言的语音策略，以跟踪单词中的合法组合和片段位置。研究表明，当对统计上的高音和低音进行测试时，婴儿反复拒绝低频词形式。我们探讨了在 9 个月时是否可以使用包含统计低段组合的词形来访问低频语音组合的能力。使用改良的转头程序，一组婴儿接受低频复合起始非词 ( dr -)，另一组婴儿接受零频率起始非词 ( dl)-)。在预先接触和熟悉之后，然后测试婴儿分割包含低频率或零频率起始的非单词的能力。只有在低频条件下的婴儿才能成功完成任务，这表明这些发作的一些经验支持分割。