Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

To what extent can language acquisition be explained in terms of different associative learning mechanisms? It has been hypothesized that distributional regularities in spoken languages are strong enough to elicit statistical learning about dependencies among speech units. Distributional regularities could be a useful cue for word learning even…

A major problem in second language acquisition (SLA) is the segmentation of fluent speech in the target language, i.e., detecting the boundaries of phonological constituents like words and phrases in the speech stream. To this end, among a variety of cues, people extensively use prosody and statistical regularities. We examined the role of pitch,…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

We tested whether adult listeners can simultaneously keep track of variations in pitch and syllable duration in order to segment continuous speech into phrases and group these phrases into sentences. The speech stream was constructed so that prosodic cues signaled hierarchical structures (i.e., phrases embedded within sentences) and non-adjacent…

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from…

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic…