Swingley, DanielBuerkin-Salgado, Angelica2023-11-222023-11-2220232023https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/592452023How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants’ linguistic experiences “in the wild”, we implemented a statistical-clustering word-segmentation model (Saffran et al., 1996) and sent its outputs to an implementation of a “frame” based form-class tagger (Mintz, 2003) and, separately, to a simple word-order heuristic parser (Gervain et al., 2008). We tested this pipeline model on various input types, ranging from quite idealized (orthographic words) to more naturalistic resyllabified corpora. Chapter 3: When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun--object) more readily formed than others (verb--predicate)? What if the context renders verb-predicate and noun-object interpretations equally plausible? We examined 14-15-month-olds’ capacity for linking semantic elements of scenes with simple bisyllabic nonce utterances using 2AFC language-guided looking. Chapter 4: One important function of phonology is to set rules about what phonetic strings count as the same words: a 'muffin' is not the same as a 'puffin'. Do infants share this intuition? We present a new experimental method to test infants' spontaneous intuitions about phonological contrast.enPsychologyPsychiatry and PsychologyLinguisticsCorpus analysisDistributional analysisInfantsLanguage acquisitionPhonologyWord learningDissertation/Thesis2023-11-22