Infants’ selective use of reliable cues in multidimensional language input.

Abstract

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants’ use of two naturally occurring sources of variability – different sounds and different people – to detect regularities in language. Monolingual infants (9–10 months) heard a male and female talker produce two different speech streams, one of which followed a deterministic pattern (e.g., AAB, le-le-di) and one of which did not. For half of the infants, each speaker produced only one of the streams; for the other half of infants, each speaker produced 50% of each stream. In Experiment 1, each stream consisted of distinct sounds, and infants successfully demonstrated learning regardless of the correspondence between speaker and stream. In Experiment 2, each stream consisted of the same sounds, and infants failed to show learning, even when speakers provided a perfect cue for separating each stream. Thus, monolingual infants can learn in the presence of multiple speech streams, but these experiments suggest that infants may rely more on sound-based rather than speaker-based distinctions when breaking into the structure of incoming information. This selective use of some cues over others highlights infants’ ability to adaptively focus on distinctions that are most likely to be useful as they sort through their inherently multidimensional surroundings.

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

“…Our investigation explored two of many possible contextual cues that might be available to infants: pitch shifting and speaker accent, which are both examples of talker-specific information. The literature on whether talker-specific information is used to track multiple statistical regularities is mixed, with some studies finding that talker-specific information is helpful (Kovacs & Mehler, 2009b;Weiss et al, 2009) while others, including our study, finding that it does not benefit learning (Potter & Lew-Williams, 2019;Tsui, Erickson, Thiessen, & Fennell, 2017). In particular, speaker gender is often a perceptually salient cue in speech, but it typically does not signal a change in statistical information.…”

“…In particular, can they separate and segment speech streams that contain incongruent statistics? Some evidence suggests that learning multiple sets of linguistic rules poses a challenge for infant learners, particularly those growing up in monolingual environments (Kovács & Mehler 2009a, 2009bPotter & Lew-Williams, 2019). Most relevant to the current study, Antovich and Graf-Estes (2018) compared monolingual and bilingual 14-month-old infants who were exposed to two congruent speech streams made up of non-overlapping syllable inventories.…”

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

“…Our investigation explored two of many possible contextual cues that might be available to infants: pitch shifting and speaker accent, which are both examples of talker‐specific information. The literature on whether talker‐specific information is used to track multiple statistical regularities is mixed, with some studies finding that talker‐specific information is helpful (Kovács & Mehler, ; Weiss et al, ) whereas others, including our study, finding that it does not benefit learning (Potter & Lew‐Williams, ; Tsui, Erickson, Thiessen, & Fennell, ). In particular, speaker gender is often a perceptually salient cue in speech, but it typically does not signal a change in statistical information.…”

“…In particular, can they separate and segment speech streams that contain incongruent statistics? Some evidence suggests that learning multiple sets of linguistic rules poses a challenge for infant learners, particularly those growing up in monolingual environments (Kovács & Mehler, , ; Potter & Lew‐Williams, ). Most relevant to this study, Antovich and Graf Estes () compared monolingual and bilingual 14‐month‐old infants who were exposed to two congruent speech streams made up of nonoverlapping syllable inventories.…”

One language or two? Navigating cross‐language conflict in statistical word segmentation

“…Conversely, this may have been insufficient evidence to cue monolinguals. Monolingual experience would likely produce a very high threshold for language change detection given their experience with a single language (for related discussion, see Poepsel & Weiss, 2016; Potter & Lew‐Williams, 2019). This mirrors evidence from Onnis et al (2018) as well as related work demonstrating that bilingual infants were more likely than monolinguals to detect and adapt to changes in a pattern presented by auditory or visual stimuli (e.g.…”