Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: Cross-linguistic evidence

“…As in the Kempe et al (2005) study, the results indicate that after exposure to the speech stream, the participants were generally better able to recognize the targets. For purposes of comparison, the data from that study are also shown in Table 1.…”

“…The speaker was experienced in the recording of stimulus materials and practiced the production of the sentences until naturalness of embedding of the pseudonouns into the natural language context was achieved. It should be noted that the pseudonoun targets and foils were identical to those used in Kempe et al (2005), with the exception that in the previous study, the stimuli were synthesized, as opposed to naturally recorded.…”

“…The aim of the present study was to extend the findings from Kempe et al (2005) by providing cross-linguistic evidence for the beneficial effects of diminutives in a natural language context. Experiments 1A and 1B were attempts to replicate the diminutive benefit, using Dutch pseudowords embedded in natural Dutch speech.…”

“…In Spanish, many words with atypical stress assignment (e.g., mamá [Mom] and camión [truck], with stress on the second syllable) have a regular penultimate stress when diminutivized (e.g., mamita [little Mom] and camionito [little truck]). In previous work (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005), we tested this hypothesis by using an incidental-learning paradigm to present a stream of trochaic, iambic, and mixed Dutch pseudowords to speakers of English. The results confirmed that stressed syllables were, indeed, perceived as word onset cues.…”

“…For example, English diminutives, such as doggie, horsie, and birdie, all end in the same vowel, Russian diminutives end in -ik, -ka, or -ko, depending on noun gender, and Dutch diminutives end in -tje / / or one of its allomorphs. In Experiment 2 in Kempe et al (2005), we investigated whether invariance in word endings introduced by diminutives facilitates word segmentation over and above the effects of regular trochaic (strong-weak) stress. We used Dutch materials because Dutch is a language with frequent and productive diminutive suffixation.…”