Statistical language acquisition: Difference between revisions

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[[Parsing]] is the process by which a continuous speech stream is segmented into its [[discrete]] meaningful units, e.g. [[sentence (linguistics)|sentences]], [[word]]s, and syllables. [[Jenny Saffran|Saffran]] (1996) represents a singularly seminal study in this line of research. Infants were presented with two minutes of continuous speech of an artificial language from a computerized voice to remove any interference from [[extraneous variable]]s such as prosody or [[intonation (linguistics)|intonation]]. After this presentation, infants were able to distinguish words from nonwords, as measured by longer looking times in the second case.<ref name = "saffran">*Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (2012). Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants. Advancement Of Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928.</ref>

An important concept in understanding these results is that of [[markov chain|transitional probability]], the [[likelihood]] of an element, in this case a syllable, following or preceding another element. In this experiment, syllables that went together in words hashad a much higher transitional probability than did syllables at [[Word#Word boundaries|word boundaries]] that just happened to be adjacent.<ref name = "review"/><ref name = "soundtomeaning"/><ref name = "saffran"/> Incredibly, infants, after a short two minute presentation, were able to keep track of these [[statistics]] and recognize high [[probability]] words. Further research has since replicated these results with natural languages unfamiliar to infants, indicating that learning infants also keep track of the direction (forward or backward) of the transitional probabilities.<ref name = "soundtomeaning"/>

The development of syllable-ordering biases is an important step along the way to full language development. The ability to categorize syllables and group together frequently [[co-occurrence|co-occurring]] sequences may be critical in the development of a ''protolexicon'', a set of common language-specific word templates based on characteristic patterns in the words an infant hears. The development of this protolexicon may in turn allow for the recognition of new types of patterns, e.g. the high frequency of word-initially [[stress (linguistics)|stressed]] consonants in English, which would allow infants to further parse words by recognizing common prosodic phrasings as autonomous linguistic units, restarting the dynamic cycle of word and language learning.<ref name = "review"/>