Lecture 7 Flashcards
Infants finding cues to word boundaries
stress patterns: in english most words start with a stressed syllable: if you assume that a stressed syllable indicates a word that should help you acquire words
stress-initial example
KINGdom
stress not initial
guiTAR
stressed syllable
TAR
Not all languages have the…. stress pattern
english-type
- with the word initial stress
How do you know what the properties of words are if you don’t know what the words are?
you can’t know that you have words with stress on the first syllable unless you know what some of the words are
statistical cues!
there are not actually spaces between words
even though in a familiar language there seems like there is
though silent boundaries may be an important cue in learning word boundaries
transition probabilities or conditional probabilities
just looking for patterns in a unfamiliar language: higher transition probability of one word transitioning into another word
what comes after “ba” alot of the time is “by” [baby]
implicitly keeping track of statistics used by infants to find out where word boundaries in their native language are
high transition probabilities
within words
most likely no word boundary
= 1
low transition probabilities
word boundaries exist
how do we find out if transition probabilities happen?
let’s do some math…
highest probability you can get is 1 (no word boundary) and the lowest is 0 (never happens)
it’s statistics
for “pa” if it’s just as likely to go to the syllables “li”, “go” and “nu” then the transition probability is
given “pa” what’s likely to come next?
1/3 or .33 transition probability for each syllable
Statistical Learning Experiement,
Saffrin, Aslin, and Newport, 1996
played made-up words to infants to assess how they were able to find word boundaries - all they had to go off of were the transition probabilities
1) played two different sounds: 3 syllable words with high within word transition probabilities and then with 3 syllable strings with lower transition probabilities (with word boundaries)
2) What do they listen to longer? - They listened to “PIRO.bi” (the low transition probability word) longer = indicates a novelty preference = infants reacting differently, suggesting they’re using statistical cues to tell the two types of words apart
What about stress?
stress vs. statistics
results from experiment Johnson and Jusczyk, 2001
results from Thiessen and Saffran (2003)
2001: tress suggested different word boundaries than statistics: found that “stress” wins
2003: Stats win at 7 months, Stress wins at 9 months
Segmentation precedes….
…stress!!!
