Seeking Temporal Predictability in Speech: Comparing Statistical Approaches on 18 World Languages.

ABSTRACT: Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences be

SUBMITTER: Jadoul Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5133256 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature