Statistical Learning Approaches to Studying Language Development

Cannistraci, Ryan A.; Ben, Rodrigo Dal; Karaman, Ferhat; Esfahani, Sara Parvanezadeh; Hay, Jessica F.

doi:10.4324/9781315110622-4

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The discovery that human infants readily identify patterns among co‐occurring elements in auditory and visual streams has profoundly reshaped our estimation of infants’ cognitive capacities by providing evidence that infants are well‐equipped to learn (for reviews, see Aslin, 2017; Cannistraci, Dal Ben, Karaman, Parvanezadeh Esfehani, & Hay, 2019; Saffran & Kirkham, 2018). This ability, called statistical learning, was originally demonstrated in the domain of word segmentation by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996); (see also Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?

Karaman,

Lany,

Hay

2024

Cognitive Science

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Infants are sensitive to statistics in spoken language that aid word‐form segmentation and immediate mapping to referents. However, it is not clear whether this sensitivity influences the formation and retention of word‐referent mappings across a delay, two real‐world challenges that learners must overcome. We tested how the timing of referent training, relative to familiarization with transitional probabilities (TPs) in speech, impacts English‐learning 23‐month‐olds’ ability to form and retain word‐referent mappings. In Experiment 1, we tested infants’ ability to retain TP information across a 10‐min delay and use it in the service of word learning. Infants successfully mapped high‐TP but not low‐TP words to referents. In Experiment 2, infants readily mapped the same words even when they were unfamiliar. In Experiment 3, high‐ and low‐TP word‐referent mappings were trained immediately after familiarization, and infants readily remembered these associations 10 min later. In sum, although 23‐month‐old infants do not need strong statistics to map word forms to referents immediately, or to remember those mappings across a delay, infants are nevertheless sensitive to these statistics in the speech stream, and they influence mapping after a delay. These findings suggest that, by 23 months of age, sensitivity to statistics in speech may impact infants’ language development by leading word forms with low coherence to be poorly mapped following even a short period of consolidation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?

Karaman,

Lany,

Hay

2024

Cognitive Science

Self Cite

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“…In natural speech, syllables that form words tend to have higher likelihood of co-occurrence (higher Transitional Probabilities, TPs) in comparison to syllables across word boundaries (Swingley, 1999; but see Yang, 2004), which provides a potential cue to segmentation. There is now a vast empirical literature showing that language learners can track differences in TPs across syllable sequences to segment continuous speech into discrete words (for reviews see Cannistraci et al, 2019;Cunillera & Guilera, 2018; but see Black & Bergmann, 2017). The experimental task in these studies usually start by familiarizing participants with a continuous speech stream in which TP is the only cue to word boundaries.…”

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Speech segmentation and cross-situational word learning in parallel

Ben¹,

Prequero²,

Souza³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Language learners track conditional probabilities to find words in continuous speech and to map words and objects across ambiguous contexts. It remains unclear, however, whether learners can leverage the structure of the linguistic input to do both tasks at the same time and how that would impact learning. To explore these questions, we combined speech segmentation and cross-situational word learning into a single task. Participants had to track speech statistics (transitional and phonotactic probabilities) to segment words and, at the same time, track co-occurrences between these newly segmented words and objects across presentations to overcome ambiguity and learn word-object pairings. In Experiment 1, when adults (N = 60) simultaneously segmented continuous speech and mapped the newly segmented words to objects, they demonstrated better performance than when either task was performed alone. However, when the speech stream had conflicting information between transitional and phonotactic statistics, participants were still able to correctly map words to objects, but surprisingly, were at chance level on speech segmentation. In Experiment 2, we used a more sensitive speech segmentation measure to find that adults (N = 35), exposed to the same conflicting speech stream, correctly identified non-words as such, but were still unable to consistently discriminate between words and part-words. Again, mapping was above chance. Our study suggests that learners can track multiple sources of statistical information to find and map words to objects in complex environments. It also prompts critical questions on how to effectively measure the knowledge that may arise from these learning experiences.

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Speech Segmentation and Cross-Situational Word Learning in Parallel

et al. 2023

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Language learners track conditional probabilities to find words in continuous speech and to map words and objects across ambiguous contexts. It remains unclear, however, whether learners can leverage the structure of the linguistic input to do both tasks at the same time. To explore this question, we combined speech segmentation and cross-situational word learning into a single task. In Experiment 1, when adults (N = 60) simultaneously segmented continuous speech and mapped the newly segmented words to objects, they demonstrated better performance than when either task was performed alone. However, when the speech stream had conflicting statistics, participants were able to correctly map words to objects, but were at chance level on speech segmentation. In Experiment 2, we used a more sensitive speech segmentation measure to find that adults (N = 35), exposed to the same conflicting speech stream, correctly identified non-words as such, but were still unable to discriminate between words and part-words. Again, mapping was above chance. Our study suggests that learners can track multiple sources of statistical information to find and map words to objects in noisy environments. It also prompts questions on how to effectively measure the knowledge arising from these learning experiences.

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Statistical Learning Approaches to Studying Language Development

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?

Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?

Speech segmentation and cross-situational word learning in parallel

Speech Segmentation and Cross-Situational Word Learning in Parallel

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