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.