inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon
@inbalarnon.bsky.social
120 followers 40 following 5 posts
Cognitive scientist, linguist and developmental psychologist. Studying language learning, language evolution, and the links between them. https://www.arnonlanguagelab.com/
www.arnonlanguagelab.com
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inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Jul 10
Here, we show that infants show better segmentation when exposed to a skewed distribution, highlighting their facilitative role, and suggesting the widespread use of uniform distributions in lab-based studies may underestimate infants’ segmentation abilities.
inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Jul 10
Infants' word segmentation has been studied extensively in the lab, but almost all studies use uniform distributions, where each word appears equally often. This is very different from the skewed frequency distributions found in natural language.
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inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Jul 10
Some happy science news (a small light in times of darkness). New paper out with @luciewolters.bsky.social and Mits Ota: : Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Skewed distributions facilitate infants' word segmentation
Infants can use statistical patterns to segment continuous speech into words, a crucial task in language acquisition. Experimental studies typically i…
sciencedirect.com
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inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Feb 7
Super clear thread by @simonkirby.bsky.social about our new paper on whale song
simonkirby.bsky.social
Simon Kirby @simonkirby.bsky.social · Feb 7
A thread explaining our new discovery about humpback whale song published today in Science... We found key statistical properties that characterise all human languages in another species for the first time. We have more in common with whales than we previously thought! doi.org/10.1126/scie...
A picture of a humpback whale just below the sea surface taken by Marc Quintin
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Reposted by Inbal Arnon
timvernimmen.bsky.social
Tim Vernimmen @timvernimmen.bsky.social · Feb 6
My latest story for National Geographic, about the similarities between whale song and human language, featuring @inbalarnon.bsky.social, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @ellengarland.bsky.social, @masonyoungblood.bsky.social and @rferrericancho.bsky.social!
What the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songs
A new study reveals that whale song and human languages share features that make them easier to learn.
www.nationalgeographic.com
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inbalarnon.bsky.social
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · Feb 6
SO very excited about new paper with @simonkirby.bsky.social and @ellengarland.bsky.social: We used infant-inspired tools to analyze eight years of humpback whale song, finding recurring parts with a Zipfian frequency distribution. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Whale song shows language-like statistical structure
Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These...
www.science.org
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