Toward a Unified Model of Lexical Acquisition and Lexical Access

Much effort has gone into constructing models of how children segment speech and thereby discover the words of their language. Much effort has also gone into constructing models of how adults access their mental lexicons and thereby segment speech into words. In this paper, I explore the possibility of a model that could account for both word discovery by children and on-line segmentation by adults. In particular, I discuss extensions to the distributional regularity (DR) model of Brent and Cartwright (1996) that could yield an account of on-line segmentation as well as word discovery.