The secret is in the sound: from unsegmented speech to lexical categories Export

@article{citeulike:4272691, abstract = {When learning language, young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and we propose an integrated model of how children might go from unsegmented speech to lexical categories. We corroborated this theoretical model using a two-stage computational analysis of a large corpus of English child-directed speech. First, we used transition probabilities between phonemes to find words in unsegmented speech. Second, we used distributional information about word edges 2013 the beginning and ending phonemes of words 2013 to predict whether the segmented words from the first stage were nouns, verbs, or something else. The results indicate that discovering lexical units and their associated syntactic category in child-directed speech is possible by attending to the statistics of single phoneme transitions and word-initial and final phonemes. Thus, we suggest that a core computational principle in language acquisition is that the same source of information is used to learn about different aspects of linguistic structure.}, address = {. Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA; . Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA; . Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada}, author = {Christiansen, Morten H. and Onnis, Luca and Hockema, Stephen A.}, citeulike-article-id = {4272691}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00824.x}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/desc/2009/00000012/00000003/art00005}, citeulike-linkout-2 = {http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/122267498/ABSTRACT}, doi = {10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00824.x}, issn = {1363-755X}, journal = {Developmental Science}, keywords = {interesting}, number = {3}, pages = {388--395}, posted-at = {2009-06-30 20:46:21}, priority = {2}, publisher = {Blackwell Publishing}, title = {The secret is in the sound: from unsegmented speech to lexical categories}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00824.x}, volume = {12}, year = {2009} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:4272691 L3 - citeulike-article-id:4272691 N2 - When learning language, young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and we propose an integrated model of how children might go from unsegmented speech to lexical categories. We corroborated this theoretical model using a two-stage computational analysis of a large corpus of English child-directed speech. First, we used transition probabilities between phonemes to find words in unsegmented speech. Second, we used distributional information about word edges 2013 the beginning and ending phonemes of words 2013 to predict whether the segmented words from the first stage were nouns, verbs, or something else. The results indicate that discovering lexical units and their associated syntactic category in child-directed speech is possible by attending to the statistics of single phoneme transitions and word-initial and final phonemes. Thus, we suggest that a core computational principle in language acquisition is that the same source of information is used to learn about different aspects of linguistic structure. IS - 3 JF - Developmental Science SN - 1363-755X AD - . Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA; . Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA; . Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada EP - 395 TI - The secret is in the sound: from unsegmented speech to lexical categories PB - Blackwell Publishing VL - 12 SP - 388 KW - interesting AU - Christiansen, Morten AU - Onnis, Luca AU - Hockema, Stephen PY - 2009/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00824.x ER -