LINGUIST List 24.36
Tue Jan 08 2013
Diss: Psycholinguistics: de la Cruz Pavía: 'Chunking the Input...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxialinguistlist.org>
Date: 08-Jan-2013
From: Irene de la Cruz Pavía <idelacruzpavia
gmail.com>
Subject: Chunking the Input: on the role of frequency and prosody in the segmentation strategies of adult bilinguals
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Institution: University of the Basque Country
Program: Masters in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Irene de la Cruz Pavía
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:
Gorka Elordieta
Itziar Laka
Dissertation Abstract:
The present dissertation investigates the abilities of adult monolingual andbilingual speakers to implement statistical and prosodic cues in speechsegmentation. Three are the aims of the present dissertation: (1) to examinewhether bilingual speakers deploy the prosodic and statistical segmentationstrategies that characterize their two languages, (2) to investigate the role thatstatistical and prosodic cues play in adult speech segmentation, and (3) toexplore whether adult speakers make use of two types of cues that have beenproposed as potentially allowing infants to determine the basic word order patter(OV/VO, head-initial or head-final) of the language under acquisition: thefrequency 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 thesegmentation preferences of ambiguous artificial languages that contain thesefrequency-based and prosodic cues by adult monolingual and bilingual speakerswere examined.
The results of the experiments showed that (1) bilingual speakers are ableto implement the frequency-based segmentation strategies that characterizetheir two languages, though acquisition of the L2’s segmentation strategyappears to be constrained, (2) statistical and prosodic cues seem to beoutranked by acoustic-phonetic cues, supporting thus a hierarchical account ofsegmentation cues in which statistical and prosodic cues are the least weighedby adult speakers, (3) frequent-initial segmentation might be the universallypreferred segmentation strategy, (4) frequency-based segmentation strategiesare available segmentation cues to adult speakers.
Page Updated: 08-Jan-2013