Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025Here, 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. 000
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025Infants' 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. 100
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025Some 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...sciencedirect.comSkewed distributions facilitate infants' word segmentationInfants can use statistical patterns to segment continuous speech into words, a crucial task in language acquisition. Experimental studies typically i… 162
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 07/02/2025Super clear thread by @simonkirby.bsky.social about our new paper on whale song 030
Reposted by Inbal ArnonTim Vernimmen @timvernimmen.bsky.social · 06/02/2025My 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!nationalgeographic.comWhat the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songsA new study reveals that whale song and human languages share features that make them easier to learn. 1199
Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 06/02/2025SO 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/...science.orgWhale song shows language-like statistical structureHumpback 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... 03712