Achievement

IGERT Trainee Constantine Lignos has been developing computational-psycholinguistic models of word segmentation (ability to segment continuous speech into known words). While many computational models of this sort have been created, they have focused on possible approaches children could use rather than modeling the actual behavior of children as they learn to segment words. In contrast, Lignos has developed a model of word segmentation that is based on children’s performance in word segmentation experiments, and it is the first to explain the changes we see in children's ability to segment words over time. Lignos has presented this work at the 2011 Boston University Conference on Language Development.