Replication of Saffran, Newport, & Aslin (1996) Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues, Exp. 1

Abstract

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).

In-lab Replication of Saffran, Newport, & Aslin (1996) Word segmentation:The role of distributional cues, Exp. 1

“…In this paper, we describe the methods and results for an in-lab replication of Experiment 1 from a classic statistical word-segmentation paper by Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996) (henceforth: SNA96). This experiment is part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical word learning in adults as possible and follows two online replications of the same study (Garcia et al, 2017;Hartshorne, 2017). The present study uses the materials from the second replication, and therefore all comparisons to our previous online replication refer to this second online replication (Hartshorne, 2017).…”