Discovering Words

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Neepin Auger’s books for children contain original, brightly coloured images and early education level concepts familiar to everyone. Cree artist and educator Neepin Auger from Bigstone Cree Nation (Woodland Cree) has created an effective early childhood education resource that is culture-based. The difference between stressed and unstressed syllables is perceptually available to infants from a young age (e.

The Latin word bulla, meaning ‘bubble’, possibly originally in imitation of the sound, has been the root for several English words. A related example of sensitivity to distributional information is the discovery of the prototypical configuration of a set of exemplars. and preference that emerges at 9-months in English-exposed infants for trochaic words (consisting of a strong/weak pattern) over iambic words (weak/strong; Jusczyk et al. When the infant looked away for more than two consecutive seconds, the test trial ended and the attention-getting video reappeared on the central monitor. Integrating information across these word forms will emphasize information that is consistent across word forms, while de-emphasizing information that is inconsistent (e.If infants fail to learn from exposure to a list of trochaic items, they should segment fluent speech – like infants in Experiment 1 – via conditional statistical cues, and show the same pattern of preference after exposure to both the trochaic and iambic segmentation stream. Please contact your hosting provider to ensure that an up-to-date and valid SSL certificate issued by a Certificate Authority is configured for this domain name on the origin server. From this perspective, infants’ and adults’ use of phonological cues is not a sign that statistical learning is unimportant for language acquisition.

This is consistent with proposal that use of statistical cues to segment speech develops earlier than use of acoustic cues such as lexical stress. Part-words were syllable conjunctions that occurred across the two more frequent words ( bida and pudo). To the extent that 5-month-olds are familiar with any lexical items, they have likely already begun to identify some acoustic regularities across those forms. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This indicates that infants segmented the same items from both the trochaic and the iambic language.

For example, some proposals have suggested that the earliest tools for word segmentation are prosodic cues (e. One argument against sensitivity to statistical information playing an important role in language acquisition is that real language is more complex than the kinds of artificial stimuli used in laboratory settings, and that statistical learning may not be sufficiently powerful or informative in the face of such complexity (e.

Integrating information across a lexicon like this should lead infants to discover that lexical forms can vary in their phonemic identity, but show a consistent word-initial stress pattern. Instead, this would suggest that language-specific prosodic cues may be the earliest cue infants use to segment words from fluent speech. The cues to which infants are sensitive early in life, such as conditional statistical information or utterance boundaries (e.Top: an excerpt of the iambic familiarization stream used in Experiment 1B; capitalized syllables represent stress. Similarly, 8- and 9-month-old infants weight language-specific cues, such as lexical stress, more strongly than conditional cues (e. On this account, infants initially rely on language-universal cues – such as sensitivity to conditional statistical information – to segment words from fluent speech.