Paper Info
Title
Using Statistics to Learn Words and Grammatical Categories: How High Frequency Words Assist Language Acquisition.
Abstract
Recent studies suggest that high-frequency words may benefit speech segmentation (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, u0026 Rathbun, 2005) and grammatical categorisation (Monaghan, Christiansen, u0026 Chater, 2007). To date, these tasks have been examined separately, but not together. We familiarised adults with continuous speech comprising repetitions of target words, and compared learning to a language in which targets appeared alongside high-frequency marker words. Marker words reliably preceded targets, and distinguished them into two otherwise unidentifiable categories. Participants completed a 2AFC segmentation test, and a similarity judgement categorisation test. We tested transfer to a wordpicture mapping task, where words from each category were used either consistently or inconsistently to label actions/objects. Participants segmented the speech successfully, but only demonstrated effective categorisation when speech contained high-frequency marker words. The advantage of marker words extended to the early stages of the transfer task. Findings indicate the same high-frequency words may assist speech segmentation and grammatical categorisation
Year
Venue
Field
2016
CogSci
Grammatical category,Segmentation,Judgement,Psychology,Language acquisition,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Speech segmentation
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rebecca Frost101.01
P. Monaghan22613.66
Morten H. Christiansen326944.17