Evidence for language-specific influence on the preference of stress patterns in infants learning an Iambic language (Hebrew)

Abstract

Purpose: The ability of infants to develop recognition of a common stress pattern that is language specific has been tested mainly in trochaic languages with a strong-weak (SW) stress pattern. The goals of the present study were: (a) to test Hebrew-learning infants on their stress pattern preference in the Hebrew language, for which the weak-strong (WS) stress pattern is the common one, and (b) to test whether the infants would generalize any preference for the common stress pattern in Hebrew to English words, which belong to a different rhythmic class.

Method: Fifty-six 9-month-old Hebrew-learning infants were tested on their preference for SW and WS stress patterns using Hebrew and English bisyllabic words with the head-turn preference procedure.

Results: The infants showed preference for WS Hebrew words but not for SW English words.

Conclusion: Hebrew-learning infants recognize the common stress pattern in their native language, supporting language-specific distributional learning by infants. This recognition, however, is not generalized to a foreign language with different prosodic characteristics.