L20 - Word Segmentation

Question 1

What type of phonemes can infants hear?

Answer 1

All phonemes up until 8 months

Question 2

How do infants learn to distinguish between phonemes?

Answer 2

Statistical learning

The sounds they hear fall on a distribution and they pay attention to the important ones

Question 3

Definitions: What is a ‘Syllable’

Answer 3

A set of phonemes

Question 4

What are the 3 components of a syllable?

Which is most important?

Answer 4

Onset

Nucleus

Code

The nucleus is most important - which is the cluster of vowels in the middle

Question 5

What is the ‘nucleus’ of a syllable?

Answer 5

The vowel/cluster of vowels in the middle

Question 6

What is a ‘morpheme’?

Answer 6

Can convey meaning but unlike a word, they do not stand on their own

Question 7

What is a ‘morpheme’ that can stand on its own considered to be?

What if it depends on another morpheme to convey an idea

Answer 7

It is considered to be a ‘root’ word

When it depends on another morpheme to convey an idea it is considered a ‘affix’ because it has gramattical function

(i.e. s to give it a plural function or ‘ed’ to show something that was done in the past)

Question 8

This is the correct segmentation for where the different words start and finish - true or false

Answer 8

False

there are no silences between words

Question 9

Can you distinguish words by looking at speech on a recording?

Answer 9

No, the pauses in words are not enough to segment words

Question 10

Do parents teach children words in isolation? (or with multiple words)

Answer 10

With multiple words, but they pronounce it slower than they would with adults

Question 11

How do we do word segmentation?

Answer 11

1. We use ‘constraints’

I.e. general rules that we all follow

2. Transitional probabilities

I.e. learning through statistical learning

Question 12

What are the two types of ‘constraints’ that we use for word segmentation?

Answer 12

Phonotactic and Prosodic constraints

Question 13

What are Phonotactic constraints?

Answer 13

Restrictions on where phoneme and syllables are allowed to be in English

Question 14

What are Prosodic constraints?

Answer 14

Rules about stress, pitch and intonation

E.g. mothers of infants raise the pitch of their speech to highlight important words

Question 15

Are language constraints universal?

Answer 15

No, culture-specific

Question 16

What are ‘transitional probabilities’?

Answer 16

Language ‘rules’ regarding where we can identify where word boundaries are

Learning through statistical learning

Question 17

Saffran, Aslin and Newport (1996) - explain the experiment methodology

Answer 17

1. A group of syllables are repeated in a repetitive cycle
2. Other syllable pairings are presented afterwards and they have to identify whether they remember the pairings or not
3. They measured ‘listening time’ of the children to determine the unfamiliarity of the syllables. They measured how long they stared out the speaker
4. If they are presented with a word that is unfamiliar they attend for longer - and are able to differentiate novel vs repetitive syllables

Question 18

What were the results of the Saffran, Aslin and Newport (1996) experiment?

Answer 18

Children can identify new syllable combinations with great accuracy - better than adults

They can understand what is likely to be a word and what is unlikely to be a word

Question 19

Explain how the sound (word) ‘bay’ uses transitional probabilities

Answer 19

It can be at the start of a word (baby, bacon) or at the end of a word (obey, bay)

If you saw it with other syllables that it commonly isn’t paired with (baytwo, baymun, bayme) you may assume there is a word boundary there.

We will hear sounds within a word together, rather than sounds across boundaries

We unconsciously keep track of these statistical probabilities and use this to identify which words should be segmented

Question 20

Three words are repeated over and over in a random order with no cues (monotone, pauses etc.) to participants. What is this transitional probabilities test showing us?

Answer 20

Shows that words with pho/ment or seg-lity are more likely to be identified with a word boundary, rather than seg-ment which was found to have 100% success in identifying when listening.

We learn with what fits and what ends with the instances we are presented with.

Question 21

What were the results of the Saffran, Newport, Aslin (1996) experiment with adults, where they gave them an artificial language with 6 words (with 3 english syllables) and the only cue to word segmentation was transitional probabilities?

Answer 21

Adults did significantly better than chance at

1. Detecting words versus non words
2. Detecting part words versus whole words

Adults are capable of using statistical regularities in a language learning task (we have the ability to use word boundaries fast, based on transitional learning)

Question 22

Experiments on 8-month-old infants regarding transitional probabilities (where they were shown repeated words in random order for 2 minutes) showed what?

Answer 22

Infants had a novelty preference for ‘non-words’

They looked at new sounds longer at the new pairings of syllables, showing that they could learn quickly

Question 23

In the second experiment infants were tested on “words and part words”. What were the part words?

Answer 23

Words that start with the end of one syllable and go onto the next

Question 24

What were the infants transitional probabilities for the part words in comparison to the whole words?

Answer 24

.5 in comparison to .1 for whole words

They heard the part words only half the time, it is more difficult than words with a transitional probability of 0 (whole words)

Question 25

Infants can tell words from non-words accurately from as young as 8 months. True or False?

Answer 25

True

Question 26

Infants will look longer at people speaking a foreign language, true or false?

Why?

Answer 26

True

because infants love novelty and they do not understand the language being used.

Question 27

“Transitional probabilities help infants and adults _____ words in speech”

Answer 27

Segment

Question 28

How well can we use computational models to calculate transitional probabilities (percentage)?

Answer 28

52- 70%

Question 29

Where do computational models tend to get transitional probabilities wrong?

Answer 29

They see the letter ‘d’ as its own word

It thinks that ‘lookat’ is one word

‘Isit’ its own word

Question 30

Computational models get things wrong in a different way than infants when they use transitional probabilities.

True or false

Answer 30

False - infants tend to make transitional probability errors in the same way that computational models do

Question 31

Transitional probabilities are…

Answer 31

The probability that one syllable will follow another

Question 32

Are transitional probabilities higher between words or within words?

Answer 32

Within words

Because we hear sound pairings within words more frequently than across boundaries

Question 33