List of Past Events
On consonants, vowels, chicken and eggs
Luca Bonatti
Tuesday, February 06, 2007, 12:00pm - 07:00pm
Laboratory of Cognitive Development, SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy and University of Paris VIII at St. Denis France
I revise evidence suggesting that several learning mechanisms are active when a speech signal is analyzed, dedicated to extract extract words or rules from the speech stream. In particular, I will show that learners are sensitive to the fact that vowels and consonants tend to encode different types of information, always related to word or rule extraction. I will argue that the data I will present cannot be accounted for by nonlinguistic, general-purpose statistically-driven computations.