Delimiting word boundaries in a speech stream is no easier than trying to determine them in the previous paragraph. So how do young infants crack the sound code? They perform frequency analyses. Take for example the sound sequence What a pretty baby you are. Through continuous exposure to human language – babbling humans produce 10,000 words and more in a single hour ! – infants progressively understand that syllables which are part of the same word tend to follow one another predictably (pret-ty, ba-by), whereas syllables that follow one another less frequently are word boundaries (a#pret, ty#ba). .
