Early Tashelhiyt Berber word segmentation: the role of the Possible Word Constraint
Domain:
natural language processingCreator:
BerElo
Editor:
Cen
Publisher:
OSF
Host:
The Possible Word Constraint (PWC) leads to the rejection of parses that leave out consonantal segments (Norris et al., 1997). Both adults and infants (Johnson et al., 2003) seem to recognize words faster and with higher accuracy when the previous segment minimally contains a vowel compared to when the segment contains only consonants. However, adult speakers of Berber seem to recognize words equally well regardless of context type because the language allows for vowelless utterances (El Aissati et al., 2012). To gain more insights into the source and development of the PWC bias, the current study will investigate whether the Possible Word Constraint has any role in the early word segmentation of Tashelhiyt Berber.