Reported that infants can make use of such segmentation cues .They presented 9-month-olds with target nonce words embedded in phrases with phonotactic cues for segmentation. That is, the phoneme combinations surrounding the target word’s onset and offset formed phoneme combinations that frequently occur across word boundaries but not within native language (English) words. Infants displayed evidence of segmenting and recognizing the novel words when good phonotactic cues were present but not when they were absent. This work demonstrates that well before infants amass large vocabularies, their early learning about sound combinations has potential to shape lexical development and contribute to the development of the protolexicon.