Anchors aweigh: The impact of overlearning on entrenchment effects in statistical learning.

Bulgarelli, Federica; Weiss, Daniel J.

doi:10.1037/xlm0000263

Cited by 38 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 51 publications

(103 reference statements)

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“…These results find additional support from a recent behavioral study demonstrating that when learners are advanced to L2 immediately after acquiring L1, they are less likely to exhibit a primacy effect relative to learners who received additional L1 input after successful L1 acquisition before encountering L2 (Bulgarelli & Weiss, 2016). In the context of this study, neural patterns from these “inefficient” L1 learners contrast with those “efficient” learners in whom decreased activation in posterior parietal cortex during early exposure is associated with lower L2, but higher L1, learning outcomes, a result not altogether surprising given the inverse correlation between L1 and L2 posttest scores.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Sampling over Nonuniform Distributions: A Neural Efficiency Account of the Primacy Effect in Statistical Learning

Karuza

Weiss

et al. 2016

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Successful knowledge acquisition requires a cognitive system that is both sensitive to statistical information and able to distinguish among multiple structures (i.e., to detect pattern shifts and form distinct representations). Extensive behavioral evidence has highlighted the importance of cues to structural change, demonstrating how, without them, learners fail to detect pattern shifts and are biased in favor of early experience. Here, we seek a neural account of the mechanism underpinning this primacy effect in learning. During fMRI scanning, adult participants were presented with two artificial languages: a familiar language (L1) on which they had been pretrained followed by a novel language (L2). The languages were composed of the same syllable inventory organized according to unique statistical structures. In the absence of cues to the transition between languages, posttest familiarity judgments revealed that learners on average more accurately segmented words from the familiar language compared with the novel one. Univariate activation and functional connectivity analyses showed that participants with the strongest learning of L1 had decreased recruitment of fronto-subcortical and posterior parietal regions, in addition to a dissociation between downstream regions and early auditory cortex. Participants with a strong new language learning capacity (i.e., higher L2 scores) showed the opposite trend. Thus, we suggest that a bias toward neural efficiency, particularly as manifested by decreased sampling from the environment, accounts for the primacy effect in learning. Potential implications of this hypothesis are discussed, including the possibility that “inefficient” learning systems may be more sensitive to structural changes in a dynamic environment.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Sampling over Nonuniform Distributions: A Neural Efficiency Account of the Primacy Effect in Statistical Learning

Karuza

Weiss

et al. 2016

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…If infants can track each set of regularities separately, then participants in both conditions should exhibit learning. However, it was possible that participants would exhibit a primacy effect, only exhibiting learning in the Initial Language condition (as observed in similarlystructured adult studies; Gebhart et al, 2009;Bulgarelli & Weiss, 2016). Alternatively, infants might exhibit a recency effect, only exhibiting learning in the Final Language condition.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Bilingualism may benefit the tracking of transitional probabilities in a complex word segmentation task (Wang & Saffran, 2014), as well as the acquisition of multiple mappings in statistical word-referent paradigms (Benitez, Yurovsky, & Smith, 2016;Poepsel & Weiss, 2016). However, several studies examining multi-language segmentation in adult bilinguals have failed to find an advantage for bilinguals relative to monolinguals (e.g., Bogulski, 2013;Bulgarelli & Weiss, 2016). Whether bilingual experience benefits infants' statistical learning of multiple incongruent speech streams is an open question for future research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: a challenge for monolingual infants

Benitez¹,

Bulgarelli²,

Byers‐Heinlein³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying statistics but overlapping features, how do infants keep track of the properties of each speech stream separately? In four experiments, we tested whether 8-month-old monolingual infants (N = 144) can track the underlying statistics of two artificial speech streams that share a portion of their syllables. We first presented each stream individually. We then presented the two speech streams in sequence, without contextual cues signaling the different speech streams, and subsequently added pitch and accent cues to help learners track each stream separately. The results reveal that monolingual infants experience difficulty tracking the statistical regularities in two speech streams presented sequentially, even when provided with contextual cues intended to facilitate separation of the speech streams. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how infants learn and separate the input when confronted with multiple statistical structures.

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“…If infants can track each set of regularities separately, then participants in both conditions should exhibit learning. However, it was possible that participants would exhibit a primacy effect, only exhibiting learning in the Initial Language condition (as observed in similarly structured adult studies; Bulgarelli & Weiss, ; Gebhart et al, ). Alternatively, infants might exhibit a recency effect, only exhibiting learning in the Final Language condition.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants

Benitez

Bulgarelli

Byers‐Heinlein

et al. 2019

Developmental Science

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Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying statistics but overlapping features, how do infants keep track of the properties of each speech stream separately? In four experiments, we tested whether 8‐month‐old monolingual infants (N = 144) can track the underlying statistics of two artificial speech streams that share a portion of their syllables. We first presented each stream individually. We then presented the two speech streams in sequence, without contextual cues signaling the different speech streams, and subsequently added pitch and accent cues to help learners track each stream separately. The results reveal that monolingual infants experience difficulty tracking the statistical regularities in two speech streams presented sequentially, even when provided with contextual cues intended to facilitate separation of the speech streams. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how infants learn and separate the input when confronted with multiple statistical structures.

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Anchors aweigh: The impact of overlearning on entrenchment effects in statistical learning.

Cited by 38 publications

References 51 publications

Sampling over Nonuniform Distributions: A Neural Efficiency Account of the Primacy Effect in Statistical Learning

Sampling over Nonuniform Distributions: A Neural Efficiency Account of the Primacy Effect in Statistical Learning

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: a challenge for monolingual infants

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants

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