Speech Segmentation in a Simulated Bilingual Environment: A Challenge for Statistical Learning?

Weiss, Daniel J.; Gerfen, Chip; Mitchel, Aaron D.

doi:10.1080/15475440802340101

Cited by 99 publications

(176 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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154

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“…Any information irrelevant to the initial regularities may be blocked for processing through selective attention (Broadbent, 1958;Conway, Cowan, & Bunting, 2001). This is consistent with previous studies on statistical learning that also demonstrate the blocking of subsequent new information by the exposure to the initial structure (Gebhart et al, 2009;Weiss, Gerfen, & Mitchel, 2009). Participants in Experiments 3 and 6 failed to learn the new regularities based on their performance in the test phase.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The persistence of the attentional bias to regularities in a changing environment

Zhao

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The environment often is stable, but some aspects may change over time. The challenge for the visual system is to discover and flexibly adapt to the changes. We examined how attention is shifted in the presence of changes in the underlying structure of the environment. In six experiments, observers viewed four simultaneous streams of objects while performing a visual search task. In the first half of each experiment, the stream in the structured location contained regularities, the shapes in the random location were randomized, and gray squares appeared in two neutral locations. In the second half, the stream in the structured or the random location may change. In the first half of all experiments, visual search was facilitated in the structured location, suggesting that attention was consistently biased toward regularities. In the second half, this bias persisted in the structured location when no change occurred (Experiment 1), when the regularities were removed (Experiment 2), or when new regularities embedded in the original or novel stimuli emerged in the previously random location (Experiments 3 and 6). However, visual search was numerically but no longer reliably faster in the structured location when the initial regularities were removed and new regularities were introduced in the previously random location (Experiment 4), or when novel random stimuli appeared in the random location (Experiment 5). This suggests that the attentional bias was weakened. Overall, the results demonstrate that the attentional bias to regularities was persistent but also sensitive to changes in the environment.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The persistence of the attentional bias to regularities in a changing environment

Zhao

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Therefore, it is unclear whether the learning of stimulus bundles can be a useful perspective to understand the observed order-sensitive behavior in those experiments. Implicit learning paradigms are less affected by this concern, because the outcome of learning can only be attributed to the statistics of the input (51,52). We hope that our results here will provide a new perspective on alternative designs that tease apart the effect of learning stimulus bundles from that of reward in such tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Learning bundles of stimuli renders stimulus order as a cue, not a confound

Qian

Aslin

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The order in which stimuli are presented in an experiment has long been recognized to influence behavior. Previous accounts have often attributed the effect of stimulus order to the mechanisms with which people process information. We propose that stimulus order influences cognition because it is an important cue for learning the underlying structure of a task environment. In particular, stimulus order can be used to infer a "stimulus bundle"-a sequence of consecutive stimuli that share the same underlying latent cluster. We describe a clustering model that successfully explains the perception of streak shooting in basketball games, along with two other cognitive phenomena, as the outcome of finding the statistically optimal bundle representation. We argue that the perspective of viewing stimulus order as a cue may hold the key to explaining behaviors that seemingly deviate from normative theories of cognition and that in task domains where the assumption of stimulus bundles is intuitively appropriate, it can improve the explanatory power of existing models.H uman cognition typically takes place in an environment where information becomes available over time. The sequential nature of information availability implies that stimulus order-the order in which a sequence of stimuli is presentedmay strongly influence the interpretation of a task environment. Consider the weather patterns in Fig. 1 as an example. If we were to record the dominant weather phenomenon in each month of a year, order 1, as shown in Fig. 1, would likely represent a typical city in upstate New York, such as Rochester. Given this sequence of stimuli, it is relatively easy for an observer to infer the existence of "seasons" underlying the weather pattern-that is, winter seems to be in effect from November to April, followed by spring/summer, and then by fall. However, if we reorder this set of stimuli from order 1 to order 2 as shown in Fig. 1, the inference of seasons becomes much less apparent. Even when the exact same set of stimuli is presented in both sequences, the difference in stimulus order has led to a dramatically different interpretation about its underlying structure. Why does stimulus order affect human cognition in this interesting way?The effect of stimulus order on cognition has often been viewed as a consequence of the way that the human mind processes information (1-8). For example, Elliott and Anderson (5) accounted for the effect of stimulus order on category learning by incorporating the mechanisms of memory decay into a categorization model. Memory decay intuitively captures the assumption that the human mind tends to be influenced by nearby stimuli more than by distant ones. It has also been hypothesized that when a sequence of stimuli is ordered in such a way that the similarity between successive stimuli is maximized, it offers a processing benefit because the stimuli being kept in working memory will be similar to each other and thus allow for easier abstraction of concepts (4). In addition, the effects of stimulus ord...

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“…First, pairing different voices with different language input sets has been shown to help both adults (Weiss et al, 2009) and infants (Gonzales et al, 2011) to segregate the languages. Second, correlated cues generally facilitate language learning.…”

Section: Implications Of the Results For Our Understanding Of Early Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, in a different paradigm, both adults (Weiss et al, 2009) and infants (Gonzales et al, 2011) have been shown to segregate two differently structured artificial languages better when they are spoken by two different voices. Still, the task of segregating and learning artificial languages is quite different from the present word-learning task.…”

Section: Predictions When Talker Variability Is Correlated With Novelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

Quam

Knight

Gerken

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Speech Segmentation in a Simulated Bilingual Environment: A Challenge for Statistical Learning?

Cited by 99 publications

References 44 publications

The persistence of the attentional bias to regularities in a changing environment

The persistence of the attentional bias to regularities in a changing environment

Learning bundles of stimuli renders stimulus order as a cue, not a confound

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

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