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Harmonic cues for speech segmentation: a cross-linguistic corpus study on child-directed speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2013

F. NIHAN KETREZ
F. NIHAN KETREZ*
Affiliation:
Istanbul Bilgi University
*
Address for correspondence: Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of English Language Teacher Education, Eyüp, İstanbul 34060, Turkey. e-mail: ketrez@gmail.com
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Abstract

Previous studies on the role of vowel harmony in word segmentation are based on artificial languages where harmonic cues reliably signal word boundaries. In this corpus study run on the data available at CHILDES, we investigated whether natural languages provide a learner with reliable segmentation cues similar to the ones created artificially. We observed that in harmonic languages (child-directed speech to thirty-five Turkish and three Hungarian children), but not in non-harmonic ones (child-directed speech to one Farsi and four Polish children), harmonic vowel sequences are more likely to appear within words, and non-harmonic ones mostly appear across word boundaries, suggesting that natural harmonic languages provide a learner with regular cues that could potentially be used for word segmentation along with other cues.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 439 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank W. U. Dressler, Fereshteh Kowssar, Agnieszka Lazorczyk, and Shadi Ganjavi for their help with Hungarian, Polish, and Farsi data, and Bariş Kabak, Toben H. Mintz, Andrew Nevins, Charles Yang, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on various versions of this study.

References

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