How do infants know where word boundaries are?

When you listen to a foreign language, it sounds like one continuous stream of speech. Why don't foreigners put breaks between words?

As it turns out, neither do speakers of your language, but you've had years to develop quite sophisticated strategies to recognise where the word boundaries fall.

So how do infants figure it out?

On the perception of rhythmic grouping

How do we perceive groups of beats? How do we decide where the "first" beat of a group is, if the sounds keep going?

The 'Iambic/Trochaic law' is that if beats contrast in length, the most prominent beat will naturally come last in the group (iambic rhythm), but if they contrast in intensity, the most prominent will naturally come first (trochaic rhythm).

A survey of word accentual patterns in the languages of the world

The next few months' reading is A survey of word accentual patterns in the languages of the world edited by Harry van der Hulst, Rob Goedemans and Ellen van Zanten. ISBN: 9783110196313

I have had an interesting voyage to get to this book, not least because I kept assuming it had the word 'stress' somewhere in the title. It is the Book of the Database: the StressTyp database, to be precise. (You see why I thought the title contained the words "Typological survey of stress".)

I do not intend to cover all 10 chapters on different language families this week, but I expect I will keep coming back to it. This week, we look at Chapter 1, an overview of word accents.