ABSTRACT
Young children are able to segment words into syllables, even though there are no perceptual or acoustic cues that indicate syllable boundaries in the primary linguistic data. We show that information about word boundaries can be used to predict syllable boundaries by replicating the results of experiments done by Gillis and De Schutter (1996) with children who syllabified Dutch disyllabic monomorphemes with a single intervocalic consonant. Word boundary probabilities were statistically computed in child language corpora and used to predict syllable boundaries with a simple statistical model. The children’s syllabification behavior could be simulated using word-boundary probabilities estimated from child language corpora. Similar results were obtained for three different corpora. In our simulations, we also investigate the question whether children acquire their knowledge of word boundaries from words from the input, from the intake, or from their own output.
