Regular Article
Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Cues

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Abstract

One of the infant's first tasks in language acquisition is to discover the words embedded in a mostly continuous speech stream. This learning problem might be solved by using distributional cues to word boundaries—for example, by computing the transitional probabilities between sounds in the language input and using the relative strengths of these probabilities to hypothesize word boundaries. The learner might be further aided by language-specific prosodic cues correlated with word boundaries. As a first step in testing these hypotheses, we briefly exposed adults to an artificial language in which the only cues available for word segmentation were the transitional probabilities between syllables. Subjects were able to learn the words of this language. Furthermore, the addition of certain prosodic cues served to enhance performance. These results suggest that distributional cues may play an important role in the initial word segmentation of language learners.

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Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Jenny R. Saffran, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, E-mail: [email protected].

This research was supported in part by an NSF predoctoral fellowship to J. Saffran, NIH Grant DC00167 to E. Newport, and NSF Grant SBR-9421064 to R. Aslin. We are grateful to Paul Allopenna, Tom Bever, Michael Brent, Boris Goldowsky, Robbie Jacobs, Toby Mintz, Jim Morgan, Seth Pollak, and Michael Spivey-Knowlton for helpful discussions, to Mark Seidenberg and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft, and to Tracey Lavonas, Denise Smith, Christa Tinari, and Rachel Tunick for their assistance in conducting the experiments.