Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Cues

Saffran, Jenny R.; Newport, Elissa L.; Aslin, Richard Ν.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1996.0032

Cited by 973 publications

(901 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Our data suggests that both of these mechanisms remain active after childhood (see Braine et al, 1990;Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999). In line with this, statistical learning has been demonstrated in both infants and adults when learning an artificial mini-language (Saffran et al, 1996b;Saffran et al, 1996a). Likewise, it appears that infants benefit from isolated and familiar words at the initial stages of language comprehension (Bortfeld et al, 2005;Mandel et al, 1995) and at the beginning of their vocabulary expansion (Brent & Siskind, 2001), and such an effect is present also in adults with their initial contact with a new language (Dahan & Brent, 1999).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…High transitional probabilities where the presence of the syllable X strongly predicts that the next syllable is Y, are most likely within words. In contrast, low transitional probabilities signaling a weak contingency between X and Y suggest word boundary (Saffran et al, 1996b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Words can be detected by computing the transitional probabilities of syllables, a process coined as statistical learning (Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996b;Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996a). High transitional probabilities where the presence of the syllable X strongly predicts that the next syllable is Y, are most likely within words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is because they indicate the offset and onset of adjacent words. However, in statistical learning research (Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1998;Saffran et al, 1996b;Saffran et al, 1996a), one has not considered how already segmented words aid to isolate the remaining words from the language stream.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Words as Anchors

Cunillera

Càmara

Laine

et al. 2010

Experimental Psychology

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Can even a handful of newly learned words help to find further word candidates in a novel spoken language? The present study shows that the statistical segmentation of words from speech stream by adults is facilitated by the presence of known words in the stream. This facilitatory effect is immediate as the known words were acquired only minutes before the onset of the speech stream. Our results demonstrate an interplay between top-down lexical segmentation and bottom-up statistical learning, in line with infant research suggesting that integration of multiple cues facilitates early language learning. The ability to simultaneously benefit from both types of word segmentation cues appear to be present through adulthood, and it can thus play a role in second language learning.3

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Words as Anchors

Cunillera

Càmara

Laine

et al. 2010

Experimental Psychology

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“…Listeners can use the acoustic correlates of prosodic structure to decode those structures, facilitating segmentation of words at prosodic boundaries (e.g., Christophe, Peperkamp, Pallier, Block, & Mehler, 2004). For instance, word-and phrase-final lengthening appears to facilitate segmentation of words not only in continuous native-language speech (Kim & Cho, 2009;Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003), but also in artificial-language speech streams (Bagou, Fougeron, & Frauenfelder, 2002;Kim, Broersma, & Cho, 2012;Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996;Tyler & Cutler, 2009). Likewise, it is well-known that stress patterns (cued e.g., by longer duration of stressed syllables in English and Dutch) are exploited in lexical segmentation (Cutler & Norris, 1988;Quené , 1993;Sluijter & van Heuven, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language

Kim

Cho

McQueen

2012

Journal of Phonetics

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a b s t r a c tHow do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic-phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless 'unaspirated' stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature { À spread glottis}; Korean has a voiceless 'aspirated' stop produced with lengthened VOT in similar environments, enhancing the feature {þ spread glottis}. Given this crosslinguistic difference, two competing hypotheses were tested. The phonological-superiority hypothesis predicts that Dutch and Korean listeners should utilize shortened and lengthened VOTs, respectively, as cues in artificial-language segmentation. The phonetic-superiority hypothesis predicts that both groups should take advantage of the phonetic richness of longer VOTs (i.e., their enhanced auditory-perceptual robustness). Dutch and Korean listeners learned the words of an artificial language better when wordinitial stops had longer VOTs than when they had shorter VOTs. It appears that language-specific phonological knowledge can be overridden by phonetic richness in processing an unfamiliar language. Listeners nonetheless performed better when the stimuli were based on the speech of their native languages, suggesting that the use of richer phonetic information was modulated by listeners' familiarity with the stimuli.

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Speech Perception

Jusczyk

Luce

2002

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology

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The scientific study of the perception of spoken language has been a productive area of research for over fifty years. During this period, we have learned much about infants' and adults' remarkable capacities for perceiving and understanding the sounds of their language. We present a selective review of the past half century of research on speech perception, focusing on three principle topics: early work on the discrimination and categorization of speech sounds, more recent efforts to understand the processes and representations responsible for spoken word recognition, and research on how infants acquire the capacity to perceive their native language. Our intent is to provide the reader with a sense of the progress our field has made over the last half century in understanding the human's extraordinary capacity for the perception of spoken language.

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Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Cues

Cited by 973 publications

References 17 publications

Words as Anchors

Words as Anchors

Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language

Speech Perception

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