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

该研究项目旨在确定学习日语的婴儿在满一周岁之前是如何处理言语流中的单词的。进行了两个实验。第一个实验对16个6个月大的婴儿进行了行为测试。我们没有任何证据表明他们能够分割双音节双语词。由于行为方法可能是没有看到预期结果的原因，我们使用erp对31名参与者进行了第二次实验。ERP分析表明，学习日语的6个月大的婴儿能够从语音流中识别和提取词形。这是第一次在这么小的日本婴儿中观察到分词能力。当父母参与社会互动时，这种分割似乎会得到加强。

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.