title: The role of prosodic boundaries in word discovery: Evidence from a computational model.
abstract: This study aims to quantify the role of prosodic boundaries in early language acquisition using a computational modeling approach. A spoken term discovery system that models early word learning was used with and without a prosodic component on speech corpora of English, Spanish, and Japanese. The results showed that prosodic information induces a consistent improvement both in the alignment of the terms to actual word boundaries and in the phonemic homogeneity of the discovered clusters of terms. This benefit was found also when automatically discovered prosodic boundaries were used, boundaries which did not perfectly match the linguistically defined ones.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/École Normale Supérieure-Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France bogdan.ludusan@ens.fr, emmanuel.dupoux@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Bogdan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ludusan
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/École Normale Supérieure-Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France bogdan.ludusan@ens.fr, emmanuel.dupoux@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Dupoux
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning