Danish-learning children are slower in the acquisition of receptive vocabulary than children in a range of other language groups. We have hypothesized that the phonetic structure of Danish, rich in vocoids and long vocalic stretches, might reduce the segmentability of the language and impede the acquisition
process (Bleses et al. 2008). As a first step, we investigated whether adults with different native languages are equally able to extract “words” from strings of concatenated CV-syllables in two conditions: 1) C is a contoid (plosive), and 2) C is a vocoid (semivowel). We found no effects of native language or CV-condition on the subjects’ ability to distinguish words from foils. However, Danish speakers are faster than Norwegians and Americans at recognizing words from an artificial language.