Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: cross-linguistic evidence.

Word Segmentation in Natural Speech. 1 Diminutives Facilitate Word Segmentation in Natural Speech: Cross-Linguistic Evidence

Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues.

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions ...

Diminutives provide multiple benefi ts for language acquisition

Th is chapter explores the hypothesis that diminutive usage in child-directed speech may provide multiple benefi ts for language acquisition. We summarize a series of experiments that exposed naïve English-speaking adults to Dutch or Russian diminutives, and tested their ability to isolate words in fl uent speech or acquire gender categories. Across studies, adults benefi ted from exposure to d...

Listeners representations of within-word structure: a cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal investigation

Japanese, British English and American English listeners were presented with spoken words in their native language, and asked to mark on a written transcript of each word the first natural division point in the word. The results showed clear and strong patterns of consensus, indicating that listeners have available to them conscious representations of within-word structure. Orthography did not ...

VnCoreNLP: A Vietnamese Natural Language Processing Toolkit

We present an easy-to-use and fast toolkit, namely VnCoreNLP—a Java NLP annotation pipeline for Vietnamese. Our VnCoreNLP supports key natural language processing (NLP) tasks including word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition (NER) and dependency parsing, and obtains state-of-the-art (SOTA) results for these tasks. We release VnCoreNLP to provide rich linguistic...