Discovering Words

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however, indicates that infants as young as 6 months are familiar with the predominant prosodic structure of words in their native language. But as these experiments indicate, distributional learning constrains subsequent statistical learning, as infants extract items that are consistent with the phonological pattern they have learned. For example Walker proposes that we shouldn't worry about fixing English because the language is always changing, to its benefit, and "the likelihood of a fixed set of spellings, meanings and usages is as remote now as it was when in 1712 Jonathan Swift complained about 'a succession of affected phrases, and new, conceited words'". Early segmentation of fluent by infants acquiring French: emerging evidence for crosslinguistic differences.

Neepin Auger’s colourful board books for infants have collectively sold well over 20,000 copies since they first appeared on the market.

Instead, this would suggest that language-specific prosodic cues may be the earliest cue infants use to segment words from fluent speech. Experiment 1A demonstrated that 5-month-old infants are able to segment word forms from speech solely on the basis of conditional probability information. Once infants have discovered a set of words, they can identify language-specific acoustic cues by taking advantage of distributional information about those word forms ( Thiessen and Saffran, 2007; Lew-Williams and Saffran, 2012).

We did not assess whether the 5-month-olds in this experiment would be able to learn an iambic pattern, which contradicts the predominant pattern of English words. On this account, infants initially rely on language-universal cues – such as sensitivity to conditional statistical information – to segment words from fluent speech. Julian Walker has managed a rare thing; creating a delightful, readable ramble through odd corners of the English language, yet one that is backed up with authoritative scholarship. Evidence suggests that young infants and even neonates are sensitive to conditional statistical information ( Kirkham et al. A small document became the Italian bulleta, which provided a further diminutive, bulletino, which came through French to English in the seventeenth century, when it was often spelt ‘bolletine’; by the early eighteenth century the spelling was established as ‘bulletin’.Conditional statistical information is potentially available in every linguistic environment, and available without prior knowledge about the acoustic regularities that characterize the language. The information in activated memories is then summated, such that information that is consistent across prior activated memories is reinforced, while inconsistent information tends to be canceled out, and an average (weighted toward the most highly activated memories) or prototype can be identified (e. From our perspective, sensitivity to conditional statistical information is one of a small set of language-universal cues that help infants extract a set of lexical items from the input (for discussion, see Thiessen and Erickson, in press).