Event Details
Finding rules and words in a speech stream
- Event Date: November 7, 2006
- Event Start Time: 1:00 PM
- Event End Time: 2:00 PM
- Event Location: Laboratory of Cognitive Development, SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy and University of Paris VIII at St. Denis, France
- Event Type: Talks: RuCCS Colloquia
- Event Semester: Fall 2006
- Event Contact: Dr. Luca L. Bonatti
- Event Extra info: <a href="http://psy.ck.sissa.it/perso/perso.html">Dr. Luca L. Bonatti</a>
How do infants and adults extract words and rules from a continuous speech stream? Recent work in artificial grammar has revealed the existence of powerful statistical mechanisms that, it has been argued, may be used to solve both these problems. I will show that statistical computations in language learning are in fact limited. I will provide evidence suggesting that different mechanisms are responsible for segmenting a continuum and identifying the structural properties of the segmented items. One of them is based on extensive statistical sampling, while the other is not. I will show that language constrains in several ways the representations open to statistical inspection.