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Words in puddles of sound: modelling psycholinguistic effects in speech segmentation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2010

PADRAIC MONAGHAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
MORTEN H. CHRISTIANSEN
Affiliation:
Cornell University, IthacaNY, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Padraic Monaghan, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YF, UK. tel: +44 1524 593813; fax: +44 1524 593744; e-mail: p.monaghan@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to capture psycholinguistic constraints on children's language perception. The model constructs a lexicon based on information about utterance boundaries and deduces phonotactic constraints from the discovered lexicon. Compared to other models of speech segmentation, our model performs well in terms of accuracy, computational tractability and the number of components of the model. Finally, our model also reflects the psycholinguistic effects of language learning, in terms of the early advantage for segmentation provided by the child's name, and by revealing the overlap in usefulness of information for segmentation and for grammatical categorization of the language.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

Work with the Festival speech synthesizer was greatly assisted by Korin Richmond. We are grateful to Ronald Peereman for the suggestion of inputting text corpora through the speech synthesizer to generate a phonological transcription.

References

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