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Category: Project

Description: Starting in the mother’s womb, language learning benefits from maternal speech exposure (DeCasper & Spence, 1986). In addition, maternal speech has been shown to facilitate discrimination of speech from background noise (Barker & Newman, 2004). In line with this boost in learning through the mother’s voice, the current study explores whether maternal speech also facilitates infants’ word segmentation, familiarizing infants to passages produced either by their own mother or an unfamiliar speaker. The test phase with isolated tokens of familiarized and novel control words revealed that infants were unable to demonstrate successful segmentation regardless of whether the speaker was their own mother or a stranger. However, further exploratory analyses suggested that familiarization impacted infants’ listening behavior with successful segmentation from maternal speech. Together, these results demonstrate that a) individual differences in infants’ listening behavior are related to their listening times during familiarization, and b) infants benefit from maternal fluent speech.