Can prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech?

Langus, Alan; Marchetto, Erika; Bion, Ricardo Augusto Hoffmann; Nespor, Marina

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.09.004

Cited by 72 publications

(82 citation statements)

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“…Christophe, Peperkamp, Pallier, Block, and Mehler (2004) and Saffran et al (1996) found that adults and infants are sensitive to final lengthening and are likely to use it for segmentation purposes. This was further verified in a number of studies (Tyler & Cuter, 2009;Kim, Broersma, & Cho, 2012;Langus et al, 2012 among others). In these studies, participants had to segment streams of an artificial language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…A whole body of studies have shown that although the most powerful and informative cues are not available to people segmenting speech in a novel language, they can nevertheless successfully cope with segmentation tasks (Wakefield, Doughtie, & Yom, 1974;Pilon, 1981). In the absence of higher-level linguistic information, listeners rely on other cues, including segmental (phonotactic, allophonic) and prosodic (duration, intensity, pitch) cues, which signal lexical stress, as well as other levels of prominence, and phrase boundaries (Vroomen, Tuomainen, & de Gelder, 1998;Toro, Pons, Bion, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2011;Langus, Marchetto, Bion, & Nespor, 2012;Ordin & Nespor, 2013). Differences in transitional probabilities (TPs) between adjacent syllables within words or straddling the word boundaries are also used to segment words from an artificial language (Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996), as well as frequency distribution of moreand less frequent speech constituents (de la Cruz-Pavia, Elordieta, Sebastián-Gallés, & Laka, 2014;Gervain, Sebastian-Galles, Diaz, Laka, Mazuka, Yamane, Nespor, & Mehler, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language

et al. 2017

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It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener's linguistic background, e.g. on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians.These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.3

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language

et al. 2017

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“…Infants, for example, take advantage of prosodic cues for detecting possible words in the linguistic input (11). Similarly, prosodic cues seem to assist adults' extraction of grammatical patterns from speech input (12,13).…”

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Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Mueller

Friederici

Männel

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

125

182

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Learning a spoken language presupposes efficient auditory functions. In the present event-related potential study, we tested whether and how basic auditory processes are related to online learning of a linguistic rule in infants and adults. Participants listened to frequent standard stimuli, which were interspersed with infrequent pitch deviants and rule deviants, violating a nonadjacent dependency between two syllables. Only infants who showed the more mature mismatch response for the pitch deviants (i.e., a negativity) showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. Concordantly, the small group of adults who showed evidence of rule learning showed larger mismatch effects for pitch processing. We conclude that the ability to extract linguistic rules develops in early infancy and is tightly linked to functional aspects of basic auditory mechanisms.language acquisition | AXB rules | pitch perception | mismatch negativity H uman language is based on an acoustically transmitted signal. The successful language learner needs to decode the linguistic content of a complex auditory signal into its component units and their relation to each other, thus deriving words and rules. Although sufficient speech input is widely considered to be crucial for language learning, the perceptual abilities that form the gateway to spoken language have long been neglected in first and second language acquisition research. Basic auditory perception may, however, be an important determinant of language learning processes across the range of normal and abnormal development.There is empirical evidence supporting the idea that early auditory abilities impact on later outcomes of language development in normal infants and populations with language-related disorders (1-3). Furthermore, auditory brainstem responses in language-impaired children suggest that low-level auditory processes contribute to the pathogenesis of language disorders (4). In adults, individual differences in perceptual abilities correlate with language-processing abilities in their native and a second language (5, 6). The findings suggest a potential causal relationship between basic auditory processing ability and the efficiency of language learning in infancy and adulthood.Although infants do not produce complex language in their first year of life, they show remarkable abilities to extract regular patterns from speech input early on. Eight-month-old infants, and even newborns, have been shown to be sensitive to transitional probabilities between syllables defining word-like units (7,8). Syllable repetitions can be detected from birth (9) and dependencies between nonadjacent units of speech can be detected as early as 4 mo of age (10). Learners seem to be able to exploit various distributional and acoustic cues to detect words and rules in speech input. Infants, for example, take advantage of prosodic cues for detecting possible words in the linguistic input (11). Similarly, prosodic cues seem to assist adults' extraction of grammatical patterns from speech input (12, 1...

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“…Most AGL studies concerned with the learning of complex systems have concentrated on mirror recursion grammars, instantiating multiple centerembedding despite their inherent well-attested difficulty in natural language parsing (Bahlmann & Friederici, 2006;Bahlmann et al, 2008;Conway et al, 2003;De Vries et al, 2008, 2012Fedor et al, 2012;Fitch & Hauser, 2004;Hochmann et al, 2008;Lai & Poletiek, 2011, 2013Mueller et al, 2010;Perruchet & Rey, 2005;Zimmerer et al, 2011Zimmerer et al, , 2014. Although a few other AGL studies implemented various types of complex hierarchical grammars, none of them have employed structuredependent, long-distance dependencies (Langus et al, 2012;Moeser & Bregman, 1972;Morgan & Newport, 1981;Mori & Moeser, 1983;Tettamanti et al, 2002Tettamanti et al, , 2009Valian & Coulson, 1988). The key phenomenon of our grammar, subject-verb agreement, is a paradigmatic case of a natural syntactic phenomenon that speakers and comprehenders easily deal with in many natural languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These phenomena have in common the potential to have intervening material in the input word string that separates syntactically related units. Whereas a number of studies have explored the possibility of implementing phrase structure grammar in an artificial language (e.g., Langus, Marchetto, Bion, & Nespor, 2012;Moeser & Bregman, 1972;Morgan & Newport, 1981;Mori & Moeser, 1983), some of them incorporating movement (Tettamanti et al, 2002(Tettamanti et al, , 2009Valian & Coulson, 1988), it is only in the last decade that structure-dependent long-distance syntactic dependencies have appeared in AGL research, in the phenomenon of multiple center-embedding. Center-embedding allows an arbitrary number of phrases to be nested within higher order phrases (e.g., [The rat [the cat killed] ate the malt]), and is therefore viewed as exemplifying recursion in natural languages.…”

Section: Implementing Hierarchical Structure In An Artificial Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning structure-dependent agreement in a hierarchical artificial grammar

Franck

Rotondi

Frauenfelder

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tWe present a novel way to implement hierarchical structure and test its learnability in an artificial language involving structure-dependent, long-distance agreement relations. In Experiment 1, the grammar was exclusively cued by phonological and prosodic markers similar to those found in natural languages. Experiment 2 contained additional semantic cues in the form of a reference world. At the group level, successful generalization of the phrase structure rules to new words was found in both experiments. Analyses of individual profiles show that a subset of participants also generalized their knowledge to novel phrase structure rules, instantiating a natural extension of the training grammar, based on recursion of coordination. Rule induction improves across-the-board in the presence of semantic cues. It is concluded that adults are able to develop, to some extent, abstract knowledge of hierarchical, structure-dependent representations despite impoverished input data and minimal training.

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Can prosody be used to discover hierarchical structure in continuous speech?

Cited by 72 publications

References 79 publications

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language

Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Learning structure-dependent agreement in a hierarchical artificial grammar

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