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A language-specific comprehension strategy

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TLDR
This work reports here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not bynative speakers of English.
Abstract
Infants acquire whatever language is spoken in the environment into which they are born. The mental capability of the newborn child is not biased in any way towards the acquisition of one human language rather than another. Because psychologists who attempt to model the process of language comprehension are interested in the structure of the human mind, rather than in the properties of individual languages, strategies which they incorporate in their models are presumed to be universal, not language-specific. In other words, strategies of comprehension are presumed to be characteristic of the human language processing system, rather than, say, the French, English, or Igbo language processing systems. We report here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not by native speakers of English.

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Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition.

TL;DR: Two versions of a “cohort”-based model of the process of spoken word-recognition are described, showing how it evolves from a partially interactive model, where access is strictly autonomous but selection is subject to top-down control, to a fully bottom-up model where context plays no role in the processes of form-based access and selection.
Journal ArticleDOI

The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

TL;DR: This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once the authors honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages.
Journal ArticleDOI

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages and show that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech.
Book

The discovery of spoken language

TL;DR: The role of memory and attentional processes in the development of speech perception was discussed in this paper, where attention to sound properties may facilitate learning other elements of linguistic organization relating perception to production.

The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access

TL;DR: In this article, a model of speech segmentation in a stress language is proposed, according to which the occurrence of a strong syllable triggers segmentation of the speech signal, whereas occurrence of weak syllables does not trigger segmentation.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

The syllable's role in speech segmentation

TL;DR: An interpretation in which the syllable is considered a processing unit in speech perception is advanced because of the results showed that reaction times to targets which correspond to the first syllable of the word were faster than those that did not, independently of the target size.
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Three theses concerning phonological representations

TL;DR: This paper argued that the unit of articulatory programming is larger in size than the segment, and made it difficult to believe that articulation consists merely in the concatenation of phonemes.
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Syllables as units in infant speech perception

TL;DR: In this paper, the role of the syllable in the processing of speech in very young infants was assessed using three kinds of stimuli: syllabic, non-syllabic and syntactic sequences, which were presented to infants who were less than 2 months old in an habituation-dishabituation paradigm.
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The role of syllables in speech processing: infant and adult data

TL;DR: In this article, an empirical account is offered of some of the constants that infants and adults appear to use in processing speech-like stimuli. But, even if physical invariants for syllables in contexts were to be found, the task facing the child still remains one of sorting thousands of types from many more tokens.
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