Syllables are the building blocks of early language acquisition. From birth onwards, infants preferentially segment, process and represent the speech into syllabic units, raising the question of what type of computations infants are able to perform on these perceptual units. Syllables are abstract phonological units structured in a way that allows to group speech sounds into sequences. The goal of the present research was to investigate 4-to-5-month-old infants’ ability to track the abstract internal structure of syllables, at a target age when the language system is not yet specialized on the sounds and the phonotactics of native languages. After familiarization to lists of syllables implementing either CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) or CCV (consonant-consonant-vowel) structures, infants were presented with new syllables implementing both structures at test. Results showed that infants preferred test syllables that matched the familiar syllabic structure, especially the group of infants familiarized with CVC. Crucially, syllabic structures at test were implemented by new combinations of phonemes, forcing infants to encode some abstract properties of the familiarization stimuli, i.e., the internal syllabic structure.This study provides the first evidence of abstract processing of syllables as whole speech units in the first months of life. These findings contribute to advance our understanding of the type of computations young infants can perform on syllabic units.
A Computational Model of Early Language Acquisition from Audiovisual Experiences of Young Infants
