Perception of Prosodic Boundary Correlates by Newborn Infants
Anne Christophe and Jacques Mehler
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
EHESS-CNRS, Paris
Núria Sebastián-Gallés
Department of Psychology
University of Barcelona
French newborn infants were shown to perceive acoustic correlates of phonological phrase boundaries in Spanish, with stress-controlled stimuli. Access to phonological phrase boundaries may facilitate the acquisition of a lexicon, as well as some aspects of phonology and even syntax.
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Examples of /latí/ stimuli with and without a phonological phrase boundary:

With-Boundary 1 to 5 . aiff: items containing a phonological phrase boundary were constructed by splicing the last syllable of a polysyllabic word and the first of the following word;
e.g. "Manuéla tímida"; "goríla tísico"

With-Boundry1.aiff
With-Boundry2.aiff
With-Boundry3.aiff
With-Boundry4.aiff
With-Boundry5.aiff

No-Boundary 1 to 5 . aiff: items without a boundary were spliced out from the middle of a word containing at least four syllables;
e.g. "gelatína"; "escarlatína"

No-Boundry1.aiff
No-Boundry2.aiff
No-Boundry3.aiff
No-Boundry4.aiff
No-Boundry5.aiff