What’s it all about?
When talking about spoken language, consider how we differentiate the non-stop sound waves hitting our ears into concrete words?
Methods:
- In English, we tend to stress the first syllable - this can give a clue it’s a new word. (hamster vs ham stir)
- In English we have rules about how every word must contain a vowel, finite set of consonant clusters at the beginning of a word, etc. (EG. gdog isn’t a word)
- We can also bootstrap from words we already know
- Within words, there’s phonemes that occur consistently - we use Statistical Regularities in Speech.