NSCS 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Vowel Harmony, Text Segmentation, Strategic Dominance
2 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Learning the words is a crucial step in learning a language. But, words are overwhelmingly presented as parts of sentences and the acoustic input does not separate one from the other. There are no silences between words - the word-segmentation problem. A space does not regularly occur between words in continuous speech. Gaps in the acoustic signal may well fall within words and different words may well fall within a same burst. It"s complicated for a child to isolate words from sentences because there are no gaps between words. 7-8 month old babies are sensitive to these cues. The tonic accent in the language = stress. 7-9 month old infants use stress as a parsing strategy. Important in turkish, not in english spanish, or. Understanding sentences must precede the understanding of words, but sentences are made of words and we cannot a sentence without first understanding the words that are in it.
