Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:55:20.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Words in puddles of sound: modelling psycholinguistic effects in speech segmentation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2010

PADRAIC MONAGHAN  and
MORTEN H. CHRISTIANSEN
PADRAIC MONAGHAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
MORTEN H. CHRISTIANSEN
Affiliation:
Cornell University, IthacaNY, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Padraic Monaghan, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YF, UK. tel: +44 1524 593813; fax: +44 1524 593744; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to capture psycholinguistic constraints on children's language perception. The model constructs a lexicon based on information about utterance boundaries and deduces phonotactic constraints from the discovered lexicon. Compared to other models of speech segmentation, our model performs well in terms of accuracy, computational tractability and the number of components of the model. Finally, our model also reflects the psycholinguistic effects of language learning, in terms of the early advantage for segmentation provided by the child's name, and by revealing the overlap in usefulness of information for segmentation and for grammatical categorization of the language.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Special Issue 3: Computational models of child language learning , June 2010 , pp. 545 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

Work with the Festival speech synthesizer was greatly assisted by Korin Richmond. We are grateful to Ronald Peereman for the suggestion of inputting text corpora through the speech synthesizer to generate a phonological transcription.

References

REFERENCES

Aslin, R., Woodward, J., LaMendola, N. & Bever, T. (1996). Models of word segmentation in fluent maternal speech to infants. In Morgan, J. and Demuth, K. (eds), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, 117–34. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bannard, C. & Matthews, D. E. (2008). Stored word sequences in language learning: The effect of familiarity on children's repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science 19, 241–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Batchelder, E. O. (2002). Bootstrapping the lexicon: A computational model of infant speech segmentation. Cognition 83, 167–206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Black, A. W., Clark, R., Richmond, K., King, S. & Zen, H. (2004). Festival speech synthesizer, Version 1.95. Edinburgh: CNRS, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Hood, L. & Lightbown, P. (1974). Imitation in language development: If, when and why. Cognitive Psychology 6, 380–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J., Golinkoff, R. & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: Familiar names help launch babies into speech stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16, 298–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. (1996). Advances in the computational study of language acquisition. Cognition 61, 1–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. (1999). An efficient probabilistically sound algorithm for segmentation and word discovery. Machine Learning 34, 71–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brent, M. R. & Cartwright, T. A. (1996). Distributional regularity and phonotactic constraints are useful for segmentation. Cognition 61, 93–125.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christiansen, M. H., Allen, J. & Seidenberg, M. S. (1998). Learning to segment speech using multiple cues: A connectionist model. Language and Cognitive Processes 13, 221–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christiansen, M. H. & Chater, N. (2001). Connectionist psycholinguistics: Capturing the empirical data. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5, 82–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Christophe, A., Dupoux, E., Bertoncini, J. & Mehler, J. (1994). Do infants perceive word boundaries? An empirical study of the bootstrapping of lexical acquisition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 95, 1570–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Curtin, S., Mintz, T. H. & Christiansen, M. H. (2005). Stress changes the representational landscape: Evidence from word segmentation. Cognition 96, 233–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cutler, A. & Carter, D. M. (1987). The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech and Language 2, 133–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahan, D. & Brent, M. R. (1999). An artificial-language study with implications for native-language acquisition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 128, 165–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frank, M. C., Goldwater, S., Mansinghka, V., Griffiths, T. & Tenenbaum, J. (2007). Modeling human performance on statistical word segmentation tasks. In McNamara, D. S. & Trafton, G. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 281–86. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gerken, L. A. (1996). Prosodic structure in young children's language production. Language 72, 683–712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hockema, S. A. (2006). Finding words in speech: An investigation of American English. Language Learning and Development 2, 119–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. K. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: When speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory & Language 44, 548–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1982). Basic syntactic processes. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language acquisition: Vol. 1. Syntax and semantics, 73–136. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1985). The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language 12, 271–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mattys, S. L., White, L. & Melhorn, J. F. (2005). Integration of multiple segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134, 477–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Monaghan, P., Christiansen, M. H. & Chater, N. (2007). The phonological–distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition. Cognitive Psychology 55, 259–305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Olivier, D. C. (1968). Stochastic grammars and language acquisition mechanisms. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Peña, M., Bonatti, L., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (2002). Signal-driven computations in speech processing. Science 298, 604–607.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perruchet, P. & Vinter, A. (1998). PARSER: A model for word segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 246–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, D. K. & Pentland, A. P. (2002). Learning words from sights and sounds: A computational model. Cognitive Science 26, 113–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent–child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language, 1–28. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Saffran, J. R. (2001). Words in a sea of sound: The output of statistical learning. Cognition 81, 149–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N. & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slis, I. H. (1970). Articulatory measurements on voiced, voiceless and nasal consonants. Phonetica 21, 193–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suppes, P. (1974). The semantics of children's language. American Psychologist 29, 103–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2001). The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure: An alternative account. Journal of Child Language 28, 127–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. (2000). The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 156–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Venkataraman, A. (2001). A statistical model for word discovery in transcribed speech. Computational Linguistics 27, 351–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M. & Price, P. J. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91, 1707–717.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed