PSYC20008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Mutual Exclusivity, Text Segmentation, Phonotactics

• School: University of Melbourne
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC20008
• Professor: Katheirne Johnson

Document Summary

Poor segmentation can lead to a lot of mistakes. Perhaps people use phonotactic constraints: limitations on which sequences of sounds are permissible in that language. Perhaps people use prosodic constraints influencing which stress patterns are common in that language. Evidence that 9-month-olds are aware of these strategies. However, the constraints only get you so far for both, you need to know something about what words are before you can use them! Intuition: words are chunks of language that always have the same sequence of phonemes dog is always d, o, g . We capture this intuition with the notion of transition probability: for each unit, it"s the probability of each other one following. Infant test: habituate infants to a stream of speech whose words are defined solely based on tps. If they respond differently to those words in isolation later, this is an indication they segmented them out successfully. Compare response to partial word (pago) and non-word (kuti).