Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Distributional regularity and phonotactic constraints are useful for segmentation

M R Brent1, T A Cartwright

  • 1Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. brent@jhu.edu

Cognition
|October 1, 1996
PubMed
Summary

Children use distributional regularity and phonotactic constraints to segment spoken words. Combining these strategies significantly improves word segmentation accuracy in early language acquisition.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

The effects of evolutionary distance on TWINSCAN, an algorithm for pair-wise comparative gene prediction.

Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology·2004
Same author

Comparison of external and internal pelvic measurements of Belgian Blue cattle from sample herds in Belgium and the United kingdom.

Reproduction in domestic animals = Zuchthygiene·2002
Same author

Integrating genomic homology into gene structure prediction.

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)·2001
Same author

The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development.

Cognition·2001
Same author

On the discovery of novel wordlike units from utterances: an artificial-language study with implications for native-language acquisition.

Journal of experimental psychology. General·1999
Same author

Syntactic categorization in early language acquisition: formalizing the role of distributional analysis.

Cognition·1997

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • Acquiring a lexicon requires children to segment continuous speech into words, a challenging task due to the absence of clear acoustic boundaries.
  • Children must rely on various linguistic cues to identify word units within fluent speech.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the effectiveness of distributional regularity (DR functions) and phonotactic constraints in children's speech segmentation.
  • To determine if these two sources of information contribute independently to segmentation accuracy.

Main Methods:

  • Computational simulations were used to analyze broad phonetic transcripts of child-directed English.
  • The study evaluated segmentation performance using formal DR functions and phonotactic rules (vowel presence, consonant cluster constraints).

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Both DR functions and phonotactic constraints significantly enhance speech segmentation accuracy.
  • The benefits of DR functions and phonotactic constraints are largely independent, with combined use yielding superior results.
  • Learning word-boundary clusters from utterance boundaries did not negatively impact segmentation.

Conclusions:

  • Distributional regularity and phonotactic constraints are crucial for children's word segmentation in early language acquisition.
  • Integrating multiple cues, such as statistical patterns and phonological rules, optimizes the segmentation process.
  • Computational models can effectively simulate and validate hypotheses about language acquisition mechanisms.