Only the right noise? Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14‐month‐olds' minimal pair word learning

Höhle, Barbara; Fritzsche, Tom; Meß, Katharina; Philipp, Mareike; Gafos, Adamantios I.

doi:10.1111/desc.12950

Cited by 20 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 64 publications

(137 reference statements)

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“…Increased visual variability in the presented objects, however, does not appear to improve infant performance (Höhle et al, 2020). Meta-analysis of Switch task experiments reveals that language-typical words are easier for infants to learn, and show a consistent advantage for bilingual infants over monolingual infants (Tsui et al, 2019).…”

Section: The Referential Ambiguity Accountmentioning

confidence: 81%

Social Inference May Guide Early Lexical Learning

2021

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We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.

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Section: The Referential Ambiguity Accountmentioning

confidence: 81%

Social Inference May Guide Early Lexical Learning

2021

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“…Yet not all irrelevant variability facilitates infants' word learning. While Höhle et al (2020) replicated the talker‐variability facilitation effect, variability in the visual appearance of objects did not facilitate word learning (see Sommers & Barcroft, 2013, for a related finding in adults). Variability could need to be in the speech signal to help infants rule out acoustic‐phonetic dimensions as potentially relevant for differentiating words.…”

Section: Evidence For Effects Of Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 96%

Impacts of acoustic‐phonetic variability on perceptual development for spoken language: A review

Quam

Creel

2021

WIRES Cognitive Science

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This article reviews research on when acoustic‐phonetic variability facilitates, inhibits, or does not impact perceptual development for spoken language, to illuminate mechanisms by which variability aids learning of language sound patterns. We first summarize structures and sources of variability. We next present proposed mechanisms to account for how and why variability impacts learning. Finally, we review effects of variability in the domains of speech‐sound category and pattern learning; word‐form recognition and word learning; and accent processing. Variability can be helpful, harmful, or neutral depending on the learner's age and learning objective. Irrelevant variability can facilitate children's learning, particularly for early learning of words and phonotactic rules. For speech‐sound change detection and word‐form recognition, children seem either unaffected or impaired by irrelevant variability. At the same time, inclusion of variability in training can aid generalization. Variability between accents may slow learning—but with the longer‐term benefits of improved comprehension of multiple accents. By highlighting accent as a form of acoustic‐phonetic variability and considering impacts of dialect prestige on children's learning, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of how exposure to multiple accents impacts language development and may have implications for literacy development. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Language Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics

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“…/buk/ and /puk/) produced by a single talker repeating a small subset of tokens, they have difficulty associating these words with 2 novel objects (in a traditional Switch task; Stager and Werker (1997); Rost and McMurray (2009)). In contrast, when infants hear these words produced by a highly variable single talker or by multiple talkers, they succeed in learning the word-object pairings (Galle, Apfelbaum, & McMurray, 2015;Rost & McMurray, 2009); this effect holds in German as well (Hohle, Fritzsche, Meb, Philipp, & Gafos, 2020). Other manipulations also help 14-month-olds with this more challenging minimal pair switch task, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying talker variability in North-American infant's daily input

Bulgarelli¹,

Mielke²,

Bergelson³

2021

Preprint

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Words sound slightly different each time they are said, both by the same talker and across talkers. Rather than hurting learning, lab studies suggest that talker variability helps infants learn similar sounding words. However, very little is known about how much variability infants hear within a single talker or across talkers in naturalistic input. Here, we quantified these types of talker variability for highly frequent words spoken to 44 infants, from naturalistic recordings sampled longitudinally over a year of life (from 6-17 months). We used non-contrastive acoustic measurements (e.g. mean pitch, duration, harmonics-to-noise ratio) and holistic measures of sound similarity (normalized acoustic distance) to quantify acoustic variability. We find three key results. First, pitch-based variability was generally lower for infants' top talker than across their other talkers, but overall acoustic distance is higher for tokens from the top talker vesus the others. Second, the amount of acoustic variability infants heard was not simply redundant with other properties of the input such as number of talkers or tokens, or proportion of speech from particular sources (e.g. women, children, electronics). Finally, we find that patterns of acoustic variability heard in naturalistic input were similar to those found with in-lab stimuli that facilitated word learning. This large-scale quantification of talker variability in infants' everyday input sets the stage for linking naturally-occurring variability ‘in the wild’ to early word learning.

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Only the right noise? Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14‐month‐olds' minimal pair word learning

Abstract: In a seminal study, Stager and Werker (1997) reported findings showing that 14-month-old English-learning infants have the

Cited by 20 publications

References 64 publications

Social Inference May Guide Early Lexical Learning

Social Inference May Guide Early Lexical Learning

Impacts of acoustic‐phonetic variability on perceptual development for spoken language: A review

Quantifying talker variability in North-American infant's daily input

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