Dissertation Information
| Title: | Chunking the Input: on the role of frequency and prosody in the segmentation strategies of adult bilinguals | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Irene de la Cruz Pavía | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://www.ehu.es/HEB/members/irene_de_la_cruz_pavia/ | |
| Degree Awarded: | University of the Basque Country , Masters in Linguistics | |
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Completed in:
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2012 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Psycholinguistics | |
| Director(s): |
Gorka Elordieta
Itziar Laka |
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| 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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