Reiko Mazuka


2017

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The Role of Prosody and Speech Register in Word Segmentation: A Computational Modelling Perspective
Bogdan Ludusan | Reiko Mazuka | Mathieu Bernard | Alejandrina Cristia | Emmanuel Dupoux
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This study explores the role of speech register and prosody for the task of word segmentation. Since these two factors are thought to play an important role in early language acquisition, we aim to quantify their contribution for this task. We study a Japanese corpus containing both infant- and adult-directed speech and we apply four different word segmentation models, with and without knowledge of prosodic boundaries. The results showed that the difference between registers is smaller than previously reported and that prosodic boundary information helps more adult- than infant-directed speech.