[lg policy] Linguist List Issue: Chunking the Input: on the role of frequency and prosody in the segmentation strategies of adult bilinguals

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Message1: Chunking the Input: on the role of frequency and prosody in the segmentation strategies of adult bilinguals
Date:08-Jan-2013
From:Irene de la Cruz Pavía idelacruzpavia at gmail.com
LINGUIST List issue http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-36.html 


Institution: University of the Basque Country 
Program: Masters in Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Irene de la Cruz Pav�a

Dissertation Title: Chunking the Input: on the role of frequency and prosody in 
the segmentation strategies of adult bilinguals 

Dissertation URL:  http://www.ehu.es/HEB/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Chunking%20the%20input.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Gorka Elordieta
Itziar Laka

Dissertation Abstract:

The present dissertation investigates the abilities of adult monolingual and 
bilingual speakers to implement statistical and prosodic cues in speech 
segmentation. Three are the aims of the present dissertation: (1) to examine 
whether bilingual speakers deploy the prosodic and statistical segmentation 
strategies that characterize their two languages, (2) to investigate the role that 
statistical and prosodic cues play in adult speech segmentation, and (3) to 
explore whether adult speakers make use of two types of cues that have been 
proposed as potentially allowing infants to determine the basic word order patter 
(OV/VO, head-initial or head-final) of the language under acquisition: the 
frequency distribution of functors and content words in natural languages 
(frequency-based cue) and the relative prominence within phonological phrases 
(prosodic cue).

	Three artificial language learning experiments were conducted, in which the 
segmentation preferences of ambiguous artificial languages that contain these 
frequency-based and prosodic cues by adult monolingual and bilingual speakers 
were examined.

	The results of the experiments showed that (1) bilingual speakers are able 
to implement the frequency-based segmentation strategies that characterize 
their two languages, though acquisition of the L2's segmentation strategy 
appears to be constrained, (2) statistical and prosodic cues seem to be 
outranked by acoustic-phonetic cues, supporting thus a hierarchical account of 
segmentation cues in which statistical and prosodic cues are the least weighed 
by adult speakers, (3) frequent-initial segmentation might be the universally 
preferred segmentation strategy, (4) frequency-based segmentation strategies 
are available segmentation cues to adult speakers. 


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