This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

xi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Intuitions and Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Previous Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.2.1 The Classical Dual Route Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.2.2 Seidenberg and McClelland 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.2.3 Plaut and Shallice 1993 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.2.4 Plaut et al. 1996: Naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.2.5 Bullinaria 1996 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 1.2.6 Plaut 1997: Lexical Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1.2.7 Harm and Seidenberg 1998: Naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 1.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2 A New Computational Model 18 2.1 Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

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The current research addresses the hypothesis that certain aspects of sequential cognition have made substantial contributions to the human language processing capability, from a functional neurophysiology perspective. We first describe a cognitive sequence processing model that was developed based on the functional neuroanatomy of primate cortex and basal ganglia. We demonstrate how this model is capable of simulating the behavior of human infants in extracting serial, temporal and abstract structure from language-like sound sequences as revealed in recent psycholinguistic experiments. We then demonstrate how, through training, this model can perform adult level syntactic comprehension, based on dissociated processing streams for open vs. closed class words. The model subsequently predicts: (1) that impaired syntactic processing (as in agrammatic aphasia) will be associated with impairments in corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks, and (2) that neurophysiological processes (as revealed by ERPs) involved in syntactic processing should also be involved in the corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks. Data confirming these predictions are reviewed. We conclude that the study of sequential cognition will provide a new paradigm for the investigation of the neurophysiological bases of language.

To learn a language, the learners must first learn its words, the essential building blocks for utterances. The difficulty in learning words lies in the unavailability of explicit word boundaries in speech input. The learners have to infer lexical items with some innately endowed learning mechanism(s) for regularity detection- regularities in the speech normally indicate word patterns. With respect to Zipf's least-effort principle and Chomsky's thoughts on the minimality of grammar for human language, we hypothesise a cognitive mechanism underlying language learning that seeks for the least-effort representation for input data. Accordingly, lexical learning is to infer the minimal-cost representation for the input under the constraint of permissible representation for lexical items. The main theme of this thesis is to examine how far this learning mechanism can go in unsupervised lexical learning from real language data without any pre-defined (e.g., prosodic and phonotactic) cues, but entirely resting on statistical induction of structural patterns for the most economic representation for the data. We first review

Abstract: Recent research in brain development and cognitive development leads to an apparent paradox. One set of recent experiments suggests that infants are well-endowed with sophisticated mechanisms for analyzing the world; another set of recent experiments suggests that brain development is extremely flexible. In this paper, I review various ways of resolving the implicit tension between the two, and close with a proposal for a novel computational approach to reconciling nativism with developmental flexibility. 1

This paper reports on two discrimination experiments involving Portuguese data. The findings support the prosodic contrast between EP and BP and stress the role played by intonation in this contrast. They also show that the perceptual distance between EP and BP is smaller than that between EP and Dutch. The robust distinction between EP and Dutch provides evidence for different perceptual weights of acoustic parameters, and points to the syllable-timed nature of EP.

Of all prosodic variables used to classify languages, rhythm has proved most problematic. Recent attempts to classify languages based on the relative proportion of vowels or obstruents have had some success, but these seem only indirectly related to perceived rhythm. Coupling between nested prosodic units is identified as an additional source of rhythmic patterning in speech, and this coupling is claimed to be gradient and highly variable, dependent on speaker characteristics and text properties. Experimental results which illustrate several degrees of coupling between different prosodic levels are presented, both from previous work within the Speech Cycling paradigm, and from new data. A satisfactory account of speech rhythm will have to take both language-specific phonological properties and utterance-specific coupling among nested production units into

Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal: in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm. Key-words: newborn speech perception language discrimination rhythm intonation prosody bootstrapping.