Word segmentation cues in German child-directed speech: A corpus analysis
| Autor: | Katja Stärk, Evan Kidd, Rebecca Louise Ann Frost |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
child-directed speech
Linguistics and Language Sociology and Political Science Computer science Speech recognition word stress corpus analysis Language Development single-word utterances 050105 experimental psychology Language and Linguistics Speech segmentation German Speech and Hearing Humans Speech 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Child Word length Language Corpus analysis segmentation cues word frequency 05 social sciences Text segmentation Infant General Medicine speech segmentation Language acquisition Experimental research language.human_language Word lists by frequency language acquisition word length transitional probabilities Speech Perception language Cues Child Language |
| Zdroj: | Language and Speech |
| Popis: | To acquire language, infants must learn to segment words from running speech. A significant body of experimental research shows that infants use multiple cues to do so; however, little research has comprehensively examined the distribution of such cues in naturalistic speech. We conducted a comprehensive corpus analysis of German child-directed speech (CDS) using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, investigating the availability of word stress, transitional probabilities (TPs), and lexical and sublexical frequencies as potential cues for word segmentation. Seven hours of data (~15,000 words) were coded, representing around an average day of speech to infants. The analysis revealed that for 97% of words, primary stress was carried by the initial syllable, implicating stress as a reliable cue to word onset in German CDS. Word identity was also marked by TPs between syllables, which were higher within than between words, and higher for backwards than forwards transitions. Words followed a Zipfian-like frequency distribution, and over two-thirds of words (78%) were monosyllabic. Of the 50 most frequent words, 82% were function words, which accounted for 47% of word tokens in the entire corpus. Finally, 15% of all utterances comprised single words. These results give rich novel insights into the availability of segmentation cues in German CDS, and support the possibility that infants draw on multiple converging cues to segment their input. The data, which we make openly available to the research community, will help guide future experimental investigations on this topic. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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