Influence of word level knowledge on vowel categorization

Abstract

Throughout their first year of life, infants start to possess an incredible amount of information on the phonetic side of language. Not only have they progressed greatly in understanding phonetic aspects of their native language, they have also started picking up signals to separate words. This phenomenon of early phonetic comprehension has been a major focus of linguists and developmental psychologists, notably the interaction between adults and infants. This paper takes a look at what influence word-level information might have towards language acquisition using model based learning. Analysis on word frequency for databases ,consisting of either adult directed speech or infant directed speech, show no huge differences in part of speech rankings, but does show differences in how often they appear. Categorization based on results from analysis was also performed, which showed slight differences when using parts of speech to aid categorization training.