Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Cues

TLDR

Infants must segment continuous speech into words, a task that may be facilitated by distributional cues such as transitional probabilities between sounds and by prosodic cues linked to word boundaries. Adults were exposed to an artificial language that used only syllable transitional probabilities as cues for word segmentation. Participants successfully learned the artificial language, and adding prosodic cues improved performance, indicating that distributional cues are important for early word segmentation.

Abstract

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.