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Inbal Arnon

@inbalarnon.bsky.social
168 followers 40 following 5 posts

Cognitive scientist, linguist and developmental psychologist. Studying language learning, language evolution, and the links between them. www.arnonlanguagelab.com

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Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
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.
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Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
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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Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
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...
sciencedirect.com
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…
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Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Super clear thread by @simonkirby.bsky.social about our new paper on whale song
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Reposted by Inbal Arnon
Tim Vernimmen @timvernimmen.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
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!
nationalgeographic.com
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.
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Inbal Arnon @inbalarnon.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
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/...
science.org
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...
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