This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

Prior research suggests that stress cues are particularly important for English-hearing infants ’ detection of word boundaries. It is unclear, though, how infants learn to attend to stress as a cue to word segmentation. This series of experiments was designed to explore infants ’ attention to conflicting cues at different ages. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings: When stress and statistical cues indicated different word boundaries, 9-month-old infants used syllable stress as a cue to segmentation while ignoring statistical cues. However, in Experiment 2, 7-month-old infants attended more to statistical cues than to stress cues. These results raise the possibility that infants use their statistical learning abilities to locate words in speech and use those words to discover the regular pattern of stress cues in English. Infants at different ages may deploy different segmentation strategies as a function of their current linguistic experience. To achieve mastery of their native language, infants must identify and learn words. Identifying words in an unfamiliar language is no simple task. Unlike the white spaces that mark the boundaries between words in a written text, speakers do not consistently place silent pauses between words when speaking (e.g., Cole & Jakimik,

Abstract not found

Abstract not found

How do infants learn the sound patterns of their native language? By the end of the 1st year, infants have acquired detailed aspects of the phonology and phonotactics of their input language. However, the structure of the learning mechanisms underlying this process is largely unknown. In this study, 9-month-old infants were given the opportunity to induce specific phonological patterns in 3 experiments in which syllable structure, consonant voicing position, and segmental position were manipulated. Infants were then familiarized with fluent speech containing words that either fit or violated these patterns. Subsequent testing revealed that infants rapidly extracted new phonological regularities and that this process was constrained such that some regularities were easier to acquire than others. Months before infants speak their first words, they have acquired extensive and detailed knowledge about the sound patterns of their native language. Indeed, sounds are the infant’s entrance point into spoken language acquisition, beginning with the rhythmic patterns of the infant’s language—knowledge acquired before birth (e.g., Mehler et al., 1988)—and extending during the 1st year to include language-typical phonological patterns such as lexical

Abstract not found

Speech is easily produced with regular periodic patterns—as if spoken to a metronome.If we ask what it is that is periodically spaced, the answer is a perceptual ‘beat ’ that occurs near the onset of vowels (especially stressed ones).Surprisingly, when periodically produced speech is studied it exhibits attractors at harmonic fractions (especially halves and thirds) of the basic periodicity.It is shown that the Haken–Kelso– Bunz model provides conceptual tools to account for the frequency histogram of acoustic beats in the speech.Why might there be attractors at periodically spaced phase angles? It is hypothesized that there are neural oscillations producing a pulse on every cycle, and that these pulses act as attractors for the beats at the onsets of syllables.Presumably these periodic time locations are generated by the same physiological mechanism as the periodic attentional pulse studied for some years by Jones (Psychol.Rev.96 (1989) 459; Psychol.Rev.106 (1999) 119).We propose that neurocognitive oscillators produce periodic pulses that apparently do several things: (1) they attract perceptual attention; (2) they influence the motor system (e.g., when producing speech) by biasing motor timing so that perceptually salient events line up in time close to the neurocognitive pulses.The consequent pattern of integer-ratio timings in music and speech is called meter.Speakers can control the degree to which they allow these metrical vector fields to constrain their timing. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd.All rights reserved.

How could children possibly acquire their first subcategorization frames? The hypothesis that they directly observe the syntactic structures of the utterances they hear raises two questions. First, how can children parse input utterances reliably without already knowing the syntactic properties of the all words in them? Second, how do children survive the ungrammatical or misconstrued utterances they inevitably encounter? This paper suggests a specific inference algorithm that substantially reduces the effects of ungrammatical or misconstrued input. Since children must have some such inference procedure, they could use approximate cues to determine syntactic structure. In particular, they can use string-local surface cues rather than global constraints. Such cues make it possible to discover relevant syntactic structure in an utterance without already knowing all the words in it. This paper also suggests a possible set of cues for English subcategorization frames that assumes only the ...

Abstract not found