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Science 18 October 2002:
Vol. 298. no. 5593, p. 491
DOI: 10.1126/science.298.5593.491l
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This Week in Science

The written word is readily identified by the blank spaces surrounding it. How do we learn to identify where one spoken word ends and the next begins? A previous study of infants has suggested that words can be identified by taking a low probability transition between syllables as a word break; that is, two syllables that rarely occur in order are more likely to be the end of one word and the start of the next. Another previous study suggests that infants can generalize from experience with a structured set of syllables and segment unfamiliar syllables into the same word structure. Peña et al. (p. 604; see the Perspective by Seidenberg et al.) have examined both kinds of pattern recognition in adults and found that generalization can be induced by a subliminal gap of 25 milliseconds between words, but that increased exposure to a continuous stream of syllables does not result in learning.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)