Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. There's a subtle difference between breathing cadence and inflection, and a completely monotempo monotonal string of sounds.

View on HN

It seems like it'd be useful for one or both of you to cite any research than has been done on this.

Seems more productive (and enlightening to all) than the agree/disagree dialogue here.

Unfourtuantly, this is so well established that it is hard to find research. I did find this paper [1] which looks into how babies acuire word boundries. As you identify, there are probably phonetic cues; but not pauses.

The best way to see this is to try listening to a language you do not understand, and try to identify word boundries.

Indeed, the paper I link argues that some phonetic cue must exist because babies can recognise word boundries.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060

It seems I linked only to the abstract. Here [1] is the pdf.

[1] https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf

Well for starters, a Japanese speaker can tell the differences between God "kami" and paper "kami"...

A monotonal, monotempo sound would not be able to make that difference audible

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

I think the claim being made is that the pause between consecutive syllables is (on average) the same whether they're part of the same word or not, so inter-syllable time is not a reliable indicator of word boundaries. Anecdotally, I think this is probably true of my speech most of the time (i.e. any time I'm not consciously enunciating). It might be less true for people with accents that have a slower cadence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com