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How infants discover morphological suffixes and use them to discover phonemes: Experimental and Computational findings | title | How infants discover morphological suffixes and use them to discover phonemes: Experimental and Computational findings |
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| start_date | 2023/07/06 |
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| schedule | 11h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle de réunion |
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| summary | Morphological suffixes like -s, -ed and -ing are the basic building blocks of English syntax. In this talk I will present research to identify the representations, time course and the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of morphology. To do so, I will integrate looking time experiments with infants (n=~350), corpus analysis and computational modeling.
I will show that English-learning infants begin to discover suffixes before 6-months. And they do so without access to meaning, or function. Additionally, I will show that infants use morphological suffixes to discover phonemes. The early discovery of suffixes is problematic for whole word models of acquisition where morphology is a by-product of shared form and meaning (Baayen et al., 2015; Tomasello, 2000). Instead, I will argue that infants represent morphemes from the earliest stages of acquisition, and that morphological acquisition precedes the discovery of phoneme (and word class).
Next, I will use computational modeling to provide a formally explicit account for how these suffixes could be learned. Model performance will be evaluated against the developmental trajectory of morphological acquisition uncovered in the infant experiments. Then, I will use the computational model as a guide to pinpoint infant experiments likely to distinguish alternate theories of morpheme discovery. Finally, I will set up predictions for the trajectory of morphological acquisition in infancy in French, Spanish and German. |
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| responsibles | Sackur |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2023/06/19 14:00 UTC |
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