Isolated words enhance statistical language learning in infancy

Abstract

Infants are adept at tracking statistical regularities to identify word boundaries in pause-free speech. However, researchers have questioned the relevance of statistical learning mechanisms to language acquisition, since previous studies have used simplified artificial languages that ignore the variability of real language input. The experiments reported here embraced a key dimension of variability in infant-directed speech. English-learning infants (8–10 months) listened briefly to natural Italian speech that contained either fluent speech only or a combination of fluent speech and single-word utterances. Listening times revealed successful learning of the statistical properties of target words only when words appeared both in fluent speech and in isolation; brief exposure to fluent speech alone was not sufficient to facilitate detection of the words’ statistical properties. This investigation suggests that statistical learning mechanisms actually benefit from variability in utterance length, and provides the first evidence that isolated words and longer utterances act in concert to support infant word segmentation.

Proficiency and sentence constraint effects on second language word learning

“…Word learning has long been an important part of exploring human language acquisition (Lew- Williams, Pelucchi, & Saffran, 2011;Yu & Smith, 2011). Because word learning is a determinant for individual language development, it has garnered much attention from educational and developmental psychologists (Deary, Penke, & Johnson, 2010;Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007;Hauser & Huang, 1997;Strenze, 2007).…”

The availability of cues for word segmentation and vocabulary acquisition in Catalan child-directed speech

“…sensitivity to acoustic cues or statistical learning mechanisms) might ultimately help children succeed in word-segmentation tasks. In fact, Lew-Williams, Pelucchi & Saffran (2011) have provided evidence that isolated words and longer utterances act in concert to facilitate infants' statistical learning. Thus, infants who were exposed to stimuli containing words both in fluent speech and in isolation detected the statistical regularities of their component syllables more successfully than infants who were exposed to the same words but only in fluent speech.…”

Estratégias de percepção da língua materna: do nascimento até um ano de vida

“…The responsibility of the brain with these patterns which are experienced at early age helps the acquisition of lexicon 22 . Studies on 11-month-olds 23 and 7 to 9-month-olds 24 have shown that these babies have an ability to use statistical information to extract words from the utterance. recognize and sketch words out, and all these three processes are crucial for the construction of vocabulary 38 .…”