Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Adult Statistical Word Segmentation Across Two Speakers, Hosung Kang

2017 Undergraduate Awards

A finding reliably demonstrated in past research is that statistical learning mechanism facilitates the process of learning language. What remain poorly understood are the effects of multiple speakers in infants and adults learning a statistical artificial language. This study sought to examine the effects of two different speakers in adults because previous literature has suggested that infants lack the ability to segment words when the speech stream consists of two different speakers. Therefore, our experiment sought to understand if 1) adults could successfully segment words across two different speakers and 2) if they can generalize segmentation to a novel voice. …