When you listen to a foreign language, it sounds like one continuous stream of speech. Why don't foreigners put breaks between words?
As it turns out, neither do speakers of your language, but you've had years to develop quite sophisticated strategies to recognise where the word boundaries fall.
So how do infants figure it out?
Showing posts with label phonotactics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phonotactics. Show all posts
A Maximum Entropy Model of Phonotactics and Phonotactic Learning
Today's paper is A Maximum Entropy Model of Phonotactics and Phonotactic Learning by Bruce Hayes and Colin Wilson, published in Linguistic Enquiry in 2008.
Phonotactics is the grammar of phonemes: which sounds can combine together, and in which environments. There is a famous example (from Chomsky and Halle 1965) that in English, brick is an existing word, blick doesn't exist but is "well-formed" i.e. a perfectly possible new word, and bnick is "ill-formed" - it could never be an English word.
Hayes and Wilson's paper is about their phonotactic learner, which attempts to answer the question "What is necessary for humans to learn phonotactic rules?" by modelling input, initial knowledge and learnt components.
Phonotactics is the grammar of phonemes: which sounds can combine together, and in which environments. There is a famous example (from Chomsky and Halle 1965) that in English, brick is an existing word, blick doesn't exist but is "well-formed" i.e. a perfectly possible new word, and bnick is "ill-formed" - it could never be an English word.
Hayes and Wilson's paper is about their phonotactic learner, which attempts to answer the question "What is necessary for humans to learn phonotactic rules?" by modelling input, initial knowledge and learnt components.
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phonotactics
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