WORD SEGMENTATION : THE ROLE OF DISTRIBUTIONAL CUES

One of the infant’s first tasks in language acquisition is to discover the words embedded in a mostly continuous speech stream. This learning problem might be solved by using distributional cues to word boundaries — for example, by computing the transitional probabilities between sounds in the language input and using the relative strengths of these probabilities to hypothesize word boundaries. The learner might be further aided by language-specific prosodic cues correlated with word boundaries. As a first step in testing these hypotheses, we briefly exposed adults to an artificial language in which the only cues available for word segmentation were the transitional probabilities between syllables. Subjects were able to learn the words of this language. Furthermore, the addition of certain prosodic cues served to enhance performance. These results suggest that distributional cues may play an important role in the initial word segmentation of language learners. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.

[1]  Zellig S. Harris,et al.  From Phoneme to Morpheme , 1955 .

[2]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  Word and Object , 1960 .

[3]  R. Rescorla.  Probability of shock in the presence and absence of CS in fear conditioning. , 1968, Journal of comparative and physiological psychology.

[4]  S. Ariel,et al.  Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. , 1968 .

[5]  John J. L. Morton,et al.  Interaction of information in word recognition. , 1969 .

[6]  E. Crook,et al.  Word Recognition , 2010 .

[7]  D. Slobin.  Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar , 1973 .

[8]  D. K. Oller,et al.  The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English. , 1973, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  R. Brown.  A First Language , 1973 .

[10]  D. Klatt.  Vowel Lengthening is Syntactically Determined in a Connected Discourse. , 1975 .

[11]  D. Klatt.  Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: acoustic and perceptual evidence. , 1976, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  Brent de Chene,et al.  Studies in Stress and Accent , 1981 .

[13]  J. Werker,et al.  Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life , 1984 .

[14]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Sublexical structures in visual word recognition: Access units or orthographic redundancy? , 1987 .

[15]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Phonological biases in grammatical category shifts , 1988 .

[16]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Exploiting prosodic probabilities in speech segmentation , 1991 .

[17]  L. Gleitman.  The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings , 2020, Sentence First, Arguments Afterward.

[18]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in grammatical category assignments. , 1992, Psychological review.

[19]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  The Role of Stress and Position in Determining First Words , 1992 .

[20]  K. Stevens,et al.  Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. , 1992, Science.

[21]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[22]  Richard Shillcock,et al.  Cognitive models of speech processing : the Second Sperlonga Meeting , 1993 .

[23]  Catharine H. Echols.  A perceptually-based model of children's earliest productions , 1993, Cognition.

[24]  P K Kuhl,et al.  Perceptual strategies in prelingual speech segmentation , 1993, Journal of Child Language.

[25]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words , 1993 .

[26]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[27]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. , 1994 .

[28]  A. Cutler.  Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions * , 1994 .

[29]  J. Mehler,et al.  Do infants perceive word boundaries? An empirical study of the bootstrapping of lexical acquisition. , 1994, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[30]  Brian MacWhinney,et al.  The Handbook of Child Language , 1995 .

[31]  T. Sejnowski,et al.  A selection model for motion processing in area MT of primates , 1995, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[32]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  Distributional Regularities of Form Class in Speech to Young Childre , 1995 .

[33]  J. Morgan.  A Rhythmic Bias in Preverbal Speech Segmentation , 1996 .