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Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

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Implicit language learning: Adults' ability to segment words in Norwegian.

Megan M Kittleson¹, Jessica M Aguilar, Gry Line Tokerud

¹University of Arizona.

Bilingualism (Cambridge, England)

|April 23, 2011

Summary

Listeners can segment words from fluent speech using statistical learning, even in natural languages. Language background did not significantly impact this word segmentation ability in adults.

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Language Acquisition

Background:

Previous research demonstrated word segmentation from artificial languages using statistical properties of input.
The ecological validity of these findings in natural languages remains to be fully explored.
The influence of a listener's native language background on this process is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To test the ecological validity of statistical learning for word segmentation in a natural language (Norwegian).
To investigate whether a listener's language background influences their ability to segment words from continuous speech.
To determine if adults can implicitly learn to segment words in a new language.

Main Methods:

Study 1: Assessed the "guessibility" of Norwegian words by 22 listeners distinguishing true words from nonwords.
Study 2: 22 adults with diverse language backgrounds implicitly learned to segment Norwegian words from continuous speech over two sessions.
Participants listened to Norwegian sentences and then identified bisyllabic test items.

Main Results:

Participants successfully differentiated Norwegian words from nonwords in both studies.
Adults demonstrated the ability to segment true words from running speech.
Results were consistent across participants from three broadly-defined language groups.

Conclusions:

Statistical learning is effective for word segmentation in natural languages, supporting previous findings from artificial languages.
A listener's language background does not appear to significantly hinder the ability to segment words from a new language.
Adults possess robust implicit learning mechanisms for acquiring aspects of a new language, including word segmentation.