How do infants find words in continuous speech?

The language abilities of human infants improve considerably in the first few years of life. Most
infants have made the transition from perceiving speech sounds and language around them, for
example even newborns are capable of discriminating certain phonetic contrasts (Bertoncini
1987), to comprehending and producing words within the first year of life. A fundamental ability
that infants have to develop in order to achieve this transition is finding words in the continuous
flow of speech found in their linguistic environment. This essay will begin by outlining the
difficulties faced by infants in discovering word boundaries, and also the difficulties in actually
studying this ability in infants. There are potentially several sources of information that can be
used by infants to aid in detecting word boundaries in fluent speech, including that in infant
directed speech, prosodic cues and statistical learning, which are likely to interact and perhaps be
used differently at different ages. Furthermore it will be important to explore whether these
abilities are likely to be innate or generally environment dependent.

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