Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream
- 1 February 2008
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Science
- Vol. 19 (2), 137-144
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02059.x
Abstract
We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploit relations among vowels to extract generalizations, but tend to disregard the same relations among consonants. In our streams, participants could segment words on the basis of transitional probabilities in one tier and could extract a structural regularity in the other tier. Participants used consonants to extract words, but vowels to extract a structural generalization. They were unable to extract the same generalization using consonants, even when word segmentation was facilitated and the generalization made simpler. Our results suggest that different signal-driven computations prime lexical and grammatical processing.Keywords
This publication has 25 references indexed in Scilit:
- On Consonants, Vowels, Chickens, and EggsPsychological Science, 2007
- Does Grammar Constrain Statistical Learning?Psychological Science, 2007
- The “Soul” of Language does not use Statistics: Reflections on Vowels and ConsonantsCortex, 2006
- An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speechCognitive Psychology, 2006
- Use of phonetic specificity during the acquisition of new words: differences between consonants and vowelsCognition, 2005
- Distant Melodies: Statistical Learning of Nonadjacent Dependencies in Tone Sequences.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2004
- Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head‐direction parameterDevelopmental Science, 2003
- Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic CategoriesCognitive Science, 1998
- Learning RediscoveredScience, 1996
- PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computersBehavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 1993