The role of prosodic boundaries in word discovery: Evidence from a computational model

This study aims to quantify the role of prosodic boundaries in early language acquisition using a computational modeling approach. A spoken term discovery system that models early word learning was used with and without a prosodic component on speech corpora of English, Spanish, and Japanese. The results showed that prosodic information induces a consistent improvement both in the alignment of the terms to actual word boundaries and in the phonemic homogeneity of the discovered clusters of terms. This benefit was found also when automatically discovered prosodic boundaries were used, boundaries which did not perfectly match the linguistically defined ones.