Like prosody, phonotactics provides cues to word boundaries in speech. Adults recognize words
more rapidly when the junction between two words forms a phoneme cluster that does not typically
occur within words (e.g., McQueen, 1998; Weber & Cutler, 2006). For example, knowledge of English
phonotactics should help listeners to detect a word boundary when they encounter a phoneme sequence
such as db (e.g., bad boy) because db does not occur word-initially or word-finally in English.
Mattys and Jusczyk (2001) reported that, like adults, 9-month-olds use phonotactic segmentation to
detect words. However, 9-month-olds also weight stress cues to word boundaries more heavily than
phonotactic cues when the two conflict (Mattys et al., 1999).