Replication of Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehler (2005) Exp. 2a

Abstract

We replicated Experiment 2a of Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehlor (2005) Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: The role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing, Psychological Science, 16(6), 451-459. This is part of a larger project investigating the reproducibility and replicability of adult statistical word segmentation studies. We replicated the study with both French-speaking subjects (as in the original) and English-speaking subjects. In both cases, we found a small but reliable effect, with subjects successfully tracking vowel transition probabilities. This is in contrast to the original paper, which found no such effect. This could be due to the much greater statistical power in the present replication.