How do Japanese-learning infants learn new words from fluent speech?

这项研究项目旨在确定学习日语的婴儿在出生一周年前是如何处理语音流中的单词的。第一项研究对16名6个月大的婴儿进行了行为测试。我们没有展示任何证据表明他们能够切分双音节双词。由于行为方法可能是看不到预期结果的原因，我们对31名参与者进行了第二次实验，使用ERPs。事件相关电位分析表明，学习日语的6个月大的儿童能够从语音流中识别和提取词形。这是第一次在如此年轻的日本婴儿身上观察到分割能力。当父母参与社会互动时，这种分割似乎得到了加强。

The research project aimed at determining how Japanese-learning infants process words within the speech stream before they hit their first anniversary.Two experiments were conducted. The first one behaviorally tested 16 6-month-olds. We did not show any evidence that they were able to segment bisyllabic bimoraic words. Since the behavioral method might have been the cause of not seeing the expected results, we conducted a second experiment, using ERPs, on 31 participants. The ERP analyses showed that Japanese-learning 6-month-olds are able to recognize and extract word form from the speech stream. This is the first time that segmentation abilities are observed this young in Japanese infants. It appears that segmentation is enhanced when the parents are engaged in social interactions.