Questionnaires to Japanese mothers reveaIed that many words they use in child-directed speech take the form of XSX or XSXS (X = regular mora; s = special mora). Using a head-turn listening preference paradigm, 8-10 month old Japanese infants were found to show a preference in listening to lists of pseudo-words that conform to the XSX pattern when compared to another list of words with three regular morae (XXX). 4-6 month old infants showed no such preference. An additional experiment eliminated

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... the possibility that the results of the first experiment were simply based on the presence or absence of special morae in the lists.