Phonotactic and acoustic cues for word segmentation in English
نویسنده
چکیده
This study investigates the influence of both phonotactic and acoustic cues on the segmentation of spoken English. Listeners detected embedded English words in nonsense sequences (word spotting). Words aligned with phonotactic boundaries were easier to detect than words without such alignment. Acoustic cues to boundaries could also have signaled word boundaries, especially when word onsets lacked phonotactic alignment. However, only one of several durational boundary cues showed a marginally significant correlation with response times (RTs). The results suggest that word segmentation in English is influenced primarily by phonotactic constraints and only secondarily by acoustic aspects of the speech signal.
منابع مشابه
The Use of Segmentation Cues in Second Language Learners of English
This dissertation project examined the influence of language typology on the use of segmentation cues by second language (L2) learners of English. Previous research has shown that native English speakers rely more on sentence context and lexical knowledge than segmental (i.e. phonotactics or acoustic-phonetics) or prosodic cues (e.g., word stresss) in native language (L1) segmentation. However,...
متن کاملAutomatic segmentation of English words using phonotactic and syllable information
It is difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of prosodic features in automatic word recognition. Recently, we applied the suprasegmental concept and proposed an extra layer of acoustic modeling with syllables. Nevertheless, there is a mismatch between the syllable and the word units and that makes subsequent steps after acoustic modeling difficult. In this study, we explore English word seg...
متن کاملExploring the Role of Stress in Bayesian Word Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars
Stress has long been established as a major cue in word segmentation for English infants. We show that enabling a current state-of-the-art Bayesian word segmentation model to take advantage of stress cues noticeably improves its performance. We find that the improvements range from 10 to 4%, depending on both the use of phonotactic cues and, to a lesser extent, the amount of evidence available ...
متن کاملModeling the contribution of phonotactic cues to the problem of word segmentation.
How do infants find the words in the speech stream? Computational models help us understand this feat by revealing the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies that infants might use. Here, we outline a computational model of word segmentation that aims both to incorporate cues proposed by language acquisition researchers and to establish the contributions different cues can make to...
متن کاملUse of Word Segmentation Cues in Adults: L1 Phonotactics versus L2 Transitional Probabilities
We investigate whether adult learners’ knowledge of phonotactic restrictions on word forms from their first language (L1) impact their word segmentation abilities in a new language. Adult learners were exposed to a speech stream in which language specific and non-language specific cues for word segmentation were pitted against one another. English rules about possible phonetic combinations (pho...
متن کامل