A role for backward transitional probabilities in word segmentation?

Abstract

A number of studies have shown that people exploit transitional probabilities between successive syllables to segment a stream of artificial continuous speech into words. It is often assumed that what is actually exploited are the forward transitional probabilities (given XY, the probability that X will be followed by Y), even though the backward transitional probabilities (the probability that Y has been preceded by X) were equally informative about word structure in the languages involved in those studies. In two experiments, we showed that participants were able to learn the words from an artificial speech stream when the only available cues were the backward transitional probabilities. Learning is as good under those conditions as when the only available cues are the forward transitional probabilities. Implications for some current models of word segmentation, particularly the simple recurrent networks and PARSER models, are discussed.