Phonological Learning Influences Label–Object Mapping in Toddlers

Abstract

Infants rapidly acquire the sound patterns that characterize their native language. Knowledge of native language phonological cues facilitates learning new words that are consistent with these patterns. However, little is known about how newly acquired phonological knowledge-regularities that children are in the process of learningaffects novel word learning. The current experiment was designed to determine whether exposure to a novel phonological pattern affects subsequent novel word learning. Method: Two-year-olds (n = 41) were familiarized with a list of novel words that followed a simple phonotactic regularity. Following familiarization, toddlers were taught 4 novel label-object pairs. Two of the labels were consistent with the novel regularity, and 2 of the labels were inconsistent with the regularity. Results: Toddlers with smaller vocabularies learned all of the novel label-object pairings, whereas toddlers with larger vocabularies only learned novel label-object pairings that were consistent with the novel phonological regularity. Conclusion: These findings demonstrate that newly learned phonological patterns influence novel word learning and highlight the role of individual differences in toddlers' representations of candidate word forms.

Statistical Language Learning in Infancy

“…Sound‐pattern regularities also facilitate mapping sounds to meanings. For example, infants familiarized with word forms that contain a specific phonotactic structure (regularities about which sounds precede and follow which other sounds) are subsequently more successful at mapping novel word forms to referents when the novel forms are consistent with the familiarized forms (Breen, Pomper, & Saffran, ). These data suggest that infants generate expectations about likely word forms based on the regularities to which they have been exposed.…”

Explicit Instructions Do Not Enhance Auditory Statistical Learning in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

“…Note that, in that artificial language, TPs between syllables were higher within word boundaries (TP = 1.0) than across word boundaries (TP = 0.33), thus making the extraction of TPs a reliable cue for word segmentation. Since then, many other works have provided support for the involvement of SL mechanisms in other levels of language acquisition, such as word-referent associations (e.g., Saffran and Estes, 2006 ; Estes et al, 2007 ; Hay et al, 2011 ; Breen et al, 2019 ), grammatical categorization (e.g., Mintz, 2003 ), the establishment of long-distance dependencies in different grammatical structures (e.g., Gómez, 2002 ; Newport and Aslin, 2004 ; Gómez and Maye, 2005 ; Thompson and Newport, 2007 ; Kidd, 2012 ; Hsu et al, 2014 ), and literacy skills (e.g., Arciuli and Simpson, 2012 ; Spencer et al, 2015 ; Sawi and Rueckl, 2019 ; Lages et al, 2022 ). Statistical learning is, thus, assumed as a powerful mechanism that enables children to detect the regularities embedded in the spoken (and written) language even without awareness or intention to do so, and to use that “knowledge” to make predictions about “what comes next,” which not only facilitates language processing but also creates the conditions for children to scale up to the extraction of other (higher) levels of regularities that mastering a language requires.…”

Statistical learning of phonotactics by children can be affected by another statistical learning task

“…In particular, the talkers were encouraged to produce the stop at the end of the /pt/, /mk/, and /fp/ sequences with some aspiration. Recordings were later scrubbed of acoustic artifacts such as breaths and tongue clicks and scaled for intensity using Praat software (Boersma & Weenink, 2021). Productions from five of the talkers were used for the familiarization items; productions from the other two talkers were used for the test items.…”

“…Researchers argue that the short-term sensitivity feeds into long-term sensitivity (Pierrehumbert, 2003). Furthermore, these sensitivities may shift over the course of development and have broader impacts including the facilitation of lexical and grammatical learning (Breen et al, 2019; Gerken et al, 2019; Gómez & Gerken, 2000).…”