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How babies find words in a stream of sound: transitional probabilities
Babies hear speech as one unbroken smear, with no gaps between words, yet somehow they start picking out words long before they can say one. One clue sits in…
Why Spanish sounds faster than Vietnamese yet says just as much
Listen to Spanish or Japanese and it seems to rush past; Vietnamese or Thai can sound almost unhurried. Yet when researchers timed 170 people reading the same…
Why English spelling doesn't match how words sound
Around 1400, English spelling roughly matched speech. Bite sounded close to "beet", meet roughly like "mate", and house like "hoose". Then, over about three…