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The authors first point out that spoken-word recognition is not a strict left-to-right process; if a listener hears that was a bun in, they must also hear "the oven" before they can recognize bun in versus bunny. They go on to suggest that this implies a system of comprehension in which strong syllables prompt a "lexical search", mentally gathering to it the weak syllables surrounding it (e.g. "guitar").
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The authors argue for the idea that a "strong syllable"-- one with a full vowel, as opposed to a neutralized vowel-- triggers syllabic segmentation. They argue specifically against the idea that we naturally attempt to segment into poetical "feet", that is, the notion that we naturally try to create multisyllabic groups from what we hear. When one strong syllable follows another, they say, we have a tendency to segment it as a new word.
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Distinct phoneme categories, claim the authors, are not learned by comparing between words (e.g. duck and tuck). Rather, phonemes are learned by their repeatedly appearing within a linguistic stream.
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The authors argue that "exposure to isolated words may significantly facilitate vocabulary development at its earliest stages." They accept that words aren't learned in isolation; in this paper they assert that exposure to isolated words will then help segmentation tasks.
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The authors show that with increasing musical experience, people are likely to choose phrase boundaries based on their abstract understanding of musical structure even if those boundaries conflict with obvious perceptual cues such as pauses or interval "leaps". Their conclusion is that musical listeners are more consciously aware of the phrase boundaries they assign.
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The authors presented words with either consistent consonant structures (and different vowels) or consistent vowel structures (and different consonants) and discovered that people were able to detect and learn the consonant-words but not the vowel-words. They conclude that people use consonants to detect word meaning and that, furthermore, consonants are "independently represented" in mental processing.
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In this experiment, "infant-directed speech" was simulated using only widened pitch contour and higher overall pitch. The authors varied the intonation so that the higher pitches didn't always occur at the beginnings of (nonsense) words, but discovered nonetheless that infants were better able to segment words from a stream with greater pitch variety. They suspect that infants' attention is better maintained with the more variable prosody.
The techniques are known infant preference techniques such as head-turn and the like. The summary of the experiments show that "synchronized visual information helps in segmentation [i.e. reading along promotes word awareness]... speech perception aids in learning meaning [i.e. words can be mapped to objects]... and attentional distractions inhibit grammatical understanding [i.e. children have to remember words to be able to use them]."
The experimenters discovered that French infants segmented syllables, rather than words which English infants appear to prefer; the authors suggest that this is because French is not a stress-based language.
As the chapter of a book, this is a fairly complete review of the research-to-date describing the relationship between awareness of phonetic sounds, segmenting of words, and word association with objects (as their labels). There's considerably more information here than I need, but the two most important observations seem to be that segmenting makes it easier to make associations, and associations make it easier to detect phonetic differences within words (as opposed to phonetic differences presented as individualized sounds).
It seems that syllables are more easily extracted when they appear at the beginnings or ends of sentences. This paper shows that either beginning or end syllables seems to be easier than syllables embedded in the middle, but their data shows that neither beginning nor end is better than the other.
Despite the fact that French is not a stressed language-- that is, words do not have "strong" and "weak" syllables-- French listeners trying to recognize unknown words in an unknown language can still benefit from stress cues. Tyler argues that earlier experiments did not actually create "strong syllables" based on vowel values, but used musical pitch accents, and these need not have been perceived as syllabic stresses.
The authors refute Keidel et al's argument by asserting that consonants are more predictive in language because that's their nature-- that's why the language formed that way in the first place, so it only makes sense that adults would have a lifetime of knowing that consonants are more linguistically meaningful.
In 12 (yes, twelve) different experiments, the authors tried to figure out whether people would learn to match two syllables if there was a third one in between (groupings of A-x-C), or if people would learn that A-syllables "came first" and C-syllables "came last". They found that people were able to accomplish the latter task when subtle pauses were inserted to indicate the beginnings and ends of groups; however, as the length of the stream increased the more likely people were to abandon general rules and remember instead the exact sound groups they had heard. Although the authors seem to be most interested in determining by what mechanism the stream is being segmented, I think their results seem to fit the hypothesis that we will remember specific groups unless our memory is incapable of retaining them, and that only after memory is overloaded do we start looking for generalizations.
The infants in this study were exposed to continuous speech streams which contained nonsense words. After exposure, the infants were able to name objects using the legitimate words, but not using the transitional syllable combinations (which had occurred between words).
The authors argue against Bonatti et al's 2005 study, saying that the consonant preference could have been explained by their adult participants' lifetime exposure to their native language, because in that language consonants predict word meaning.
The experimenters exposed infants to two-syllable nonsense words, with pauses between each word, which were accented on the first or second syllable; they found that this exposure influenced the infants' subsequent strategy for segmenting a stream of these syllables when the pauses were removed. They use this result to argue that infants learn to join syllables (or to segment words) by learning the predominant pattern in their native language.
Thompson, S.P. and Newport, E.L. (2007). Statistical learning of syntax: the role of transitional probability. Language Learning and Development, 3(1), 1-42.
The authors supposed that the likelihood of certain syllables following each other would influence a listener's segmenting choices. By constructing simple grammars with nonsense syllables, they tested four types of complexities: optional phrases, repeated phrases, moved phrases, and increasing the quantity of members in a certain grammatical class. Their most interesting finding is not that each of these manipulations were detected and resolved by the listeners, which is an accomplishment in itself, but that combining all manipulations into a single language improved listeners' ability to segment. They observe more generally that when a rule is applied in an ordered manner, it tends to enhance rather than confuse, despite the increased complexity of the resulting stream.
Toro, J.M., Bonatti, L.L., Nespor, M., and Mehler, J. (in press). Finding words and rules in a speech stream: Functional differences between vowels and consonants. Psychological Science.