We replicated Exp. 1 of Finn & Hudson Kam (2008) The curse of knowledge: First language knowledge impairs adult learners’ use of novel statistics for word segmentation, Cognition, 108, 477-499, as part of a multi-year effort to replicate every adult statistical word segmentation study. Unlike the original study, we do not find clear evidence that English-speaking adults fail to successfully segment words that violate the phonotactic constraints of English.

We replicated Exp. 1 of Saffran, Newport, & Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional Cues, Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621, as part of a multi-year project to replicate every published adult statistical word segmentation study. Despite a much larger sample than the original (101 subjects vs. 24), evidence of successful segmentation was weak and mixed, and none of the item or condition effects replicated. We consider whether this is more likely to be a failure of replication or a failure of generalization (e.g., to a different population).

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