Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

Abstract

The lexicon contains discrete entries, which must be located in speech input in order for speech to be understood; but the continuity of speech signals means that lexical access from spoken input involves a segmentation problem for listeners. The speech environment of prelinguistic infants may not provide special information to assist the infant listeners in solving this problem. Mature language users in possession of a lexicon might be thought to be able to avoid explicit segmentation of speech by relying on information from successful lexical access; however, evidence from adult perceptual studies indicates that listeners do use explicit segmentation procedures. These procedures differ across languages and seem to exploit language-specific rhythmic structure. Efficient as these procedures are, they may not have been developed in response to statistical properties of the input, because bilinguals, equally competent in two languages, apparently only possess one rhythmic segmentation procedure. The origin of rhythmic segmentation may therefore lie in the infant's exploitation of rhythm to solve the segmentation problem and gain a first toehold on lexical acquisition. Recent evidence from speech production and perception studies with prelinguistic infants supports the claim that infants are sensitive to rhythmic structure and its relationship to lexical segmentation.

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: Cross-linguistic evidence

“…A large body of research has shown that spoken language is rich in word segmentation cues, such as utterance boundaries (Brent & Siskind, 2001), metrical stress regularities (Cutler, 1994;Cutler & Norris, 1988), and context-or position-sensitive allomorphy (e.g., Jusczyk, Hohne, & Bauman, 1999;Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001a). In this study, we tested yet another word segmentation cue, invariance in word endings.…”

Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues

“…Regularized stress patterns facilitate the use of a metrical segmentation strategy (Cutler, 1994;Cutler & Norris, 1988), by which listeners rely on knowledge about predominant rhythmic patterns in their language to detect word boundaries. It has been shown that English stressed syllables are important cues for word onsets, which are utilized by infants and adults, both with phonotactically familiar (Echols et al, 1997;Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999) and with unfamiliar (Houston, Jusczyk, Kuijpers, Coolen, & Cutler, 2000) language input.…”

Dal suono alla parola

“…Dunque i bambini sembrano essere estremamente sensibili al "ritmo" della lingua: già nei primi giorni di vita i neonati sono in grado di discriminare tra gruppi di bisillabi con e senza confine interno di parola (Cutler 1994). In sostanza l'ipotesi è che fino dalla prima infanzia si venga a formare una procedura di segmentazione prosodica dell'eloquio, legata in modo univoco alla specifica lingua madre a cui si è esposti.…”