Judging Words by Their Covers and the Company They Keep: Probabilistic Cues Support Word Learning

Abstract

Statistical learning may be central to lexical and grammatical development: The phonological and distributional properties of words provide probabilistic cues to their grammatical and semantic properties. Infants can capitalize on probabilistic cues to learn grammatical patterns in listening tasks. However, infants often struggle to learn labels when performance requires attending to less obvious cues, raising the question of whether probabilistic cues support word learning. The current experiment presented forty 22-month-olds with an artificial language containing probabilistic correlations between words’ statistical and semantic properties. Only infants with higher levels of grammatical development capitalized on statistical cues to support learning word-referent mappings. These findings suggest that infants’ sensitivity to correlations between sounds and meanings may support both word learning and grammatical development.

Individual Differences in Statistical Learning Predict Children's Comprehension of Syntax

“…Our hypothesis was supported: Children experienced greater difficulty and showed wider variability in comprehending passives and object RCs, and performance on these structures was significantly and independently predicted by their SL ability. The data are consistent with previous demonstrations of a significant SL–grammar link in acquisition (Conway et al., ; Kidd, ; Lany, ; Lum et al., ), and extend those data by demonstrating that the link is related to the frequency distributions of specific structures. Conway et al.…”

“…Associations between SL and grammar have been reported using both auditory and visual SL tasks (e.g., in children: Lany, 2014;Kidd, 2012;in adults: Conway et al, 2010;Misyak et al, 2010), suggesting that a domain-general capacity for SL supports acquisition and processing. We chose a nonlinguistic visual test of SL that has been shown to elicit variability in children (Arciuli & Simpson, 2011) and has revealed a link between SL and language proficiency (Arciuli & Simpson, 2012).…”

Statistical learning of language: Theory, validity, and predictions of a statistical learning account of language acquisition

“…Similarly, another study found that adult implicit learning performance as measured by the Serial Reaction Time Task was correlated with the performance on two foreign language examinations (Kaufman et al, 2010). Another relevant study explored infants learning of form-based categories when statistical cues (i.e., distributional and phonological cues about label identity) were probabilistically predictive of semantic category membership (i.e., whether the label tended to be paired with animals or vehicles; Lany, 2014). Only the infants in the study with higher levels of grammatical development were able to use the statistical cues to support learning mappings between the labels and semantic categories, which is consistent with the idea that infants' sensitivity to relations between forms and meanings supports both learning of words and grammar.…”

Artificial Grammar Learning and Its Neurobiology in Relation to Language Processing and Development

“…A first line of behavioral AGL research emerged from the landmark study by Saffran et al (1996), showing that eight-month-old infants utilize transitional probabilities of syllables for defining word boundaries in continuous speech. Follow-up studies demonstrated that infants employ statistical speech properties in word segmentation (Marchetto & Bonatti, 2015;Saffran, 2001;Shukla et al, 2011), discovering non-adjacent structure regularities (Gómez & Maye, 2005;Marchetto & Bonatti, 2015), acquiring lexical-semantic categories (Lany, 2014;Lany & Saffran, 2010), and establishing grammatical categories (Höhle et al, 2004;Shi et al, 2006). A second line of behavioral AGL research is based on the seminal study by Marcus et al (1999), reporting seven-month-old infants' ability to detect abstract speech patterns, as defined by repetitions and alternations of speech elements (see also Gómez & Gerken, 1999).…”