The longevity of statistical learning: When infant memory decays, isolated words come to the rescue.

Karaman, Ferhat; Hay, Jessica F.

doi:10.1037/xlm0000448

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…If an artificial language has systematic PP differences among its' words and/or part-words, participants' native PP knowledge may affect segmentation, regardless of TP information (Finn & Hudson Kam, 2008;Mersad & Nazzi, 2011). Made-up words in statistical learning studies usually have legal phonotactics (e.g., Karaman & Hay, 2018;Mirman et al, 2008;Pelucchi et al, 2009). However, variations in phonotactic probabilities are seldom controlled.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When statistics collide: The use of transitional and phonotactic probability cues to word boundaries

2021

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Statistical regularities in linguistic input, such as transitional probability and phonotactic probability, have been shown to promote speech segmentation. It remains unclear, however, whether or how the combination of transitional probabilities and subtle phonotactic probabilities influence segmentation. The present study provides a fine-grained investigation of the effects of such combined statistics. Adults (N = 81) were tested in one of two conditions. In the Anchor condition, they heard a continuous stream of words with small differences in phonotactic probabilities. In the Uniform condition, all words had comparable phonotactic probabilities. In both conditions, transitional probability was stronger in words than part-words. Only participants from the Anchor condition preferred words at test, indicating that the combination of transitional probabilities and subtle phonotactic probabilities may facilitate speech segmentation. We discuss the methodological implications of our findings which demonstrate that even small phonotactic variations should be accounted for when investigating statistical speech segmentation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When statistics collide: The use of transitional and phonotactic probability cues to word boundaries

2021

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“…Critically, because the metrical and phonotactic properties of Italian do not violate those of English, English-learning infants should not be prohibited from tracking TPs in Italian. Indeed, English-learning infants show evidence of tracking TPs within fluent Italian speech across a wide age range, including infants younger (Hay et al, 2011;Karaman & Hay, 2018;Pelucchi et al, 2009a,b) and older (Hay et al, unpublished data) than those tested here.…”

Section: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 60%

Do Infants Learn Words From Statistics? Evidence From English‐Learning Infants Hearing Italian

et al. 2018

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Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word-like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants' native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English-learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning.

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“…An additional alternate explanation for monolinguals’ failure in the preferential listening task is that they were able to track the regularities in the speech but were unable to retain the wordforms elicited via those regularities across the brief delay between exposure and test. Past work suggests that infants’ memories for newly segmented words are fragile, and thus even the short delay might have impeded their ability to recognize previously segmented wordforms at test (Benavides‐Varela et al, 2011; Karaman & Hay, 2018). There is some evidence that bilinguals may demonstrate advantages related to memory (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

One language or two? Navigating cross‐language conflict in statistical word segmentation

Antovich

Estes

2020

Developmental Science

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Despite the prevalence of bilingualism (Crystal, 2004; Grosjean, 2010), there is limited work investigating how infants detect words in two languages. Infants with bilingual exposure may encounter conflicting prosodic, lexical, and co-occurrence cues to word boundaries across their languages, which in turn could disrupt word segmentation. For example, an infant learning both French and English would encounter opposing prosodic cues; the predominant stress pattern in English is trochaic (strong-weak), whereas French words tend to follow an iambic (weak-strong) pattern. Language-specific patterns that support segmentation within one language may interfere with segmentation in another (Polka, Orena, Sundara, & Worrall, 2017). However, effective separation of the languages' properties and efficient shifting between language contexts may support accurate word segmentation and allow infants to learn from the rich information present in dual speech streams. Early exposure to diverse regularities across languages may allow infants' language knowledge to self-organize into linguistic clusters over time (e.g. PRIMIR; Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2011). This process would improve as infants learn core features that differentiate between languages (e.g. prosody, phonology, etc.; Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker, 2010), allowing infants to monitor for language changes and to integrate new information by language, reducing cross-linguistic interference. This is critical, as the language in use in bilingual environments may change between, or even within, interactions and speakers, and failure to anticipate language switches can incur processing costs for both infants and adults (Byers-Heinlein, Morin-Lessard, & Lew-Williams, 2017), suggesting that change detection is important for efficient bilingual processing. Once bilinguals acquire tools to track information for each language separately, they can more effectively learn language-specific

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The longevity of statistical learning: When infant memory decays, isolated words come to the rescue.

Cited by 17 publications

References 67 publications

When statistics collide: The use of transitional and phonotactic probability cues to word boundaries

When statistics collide: The use of transitional and phonotactic probability cues to word boundaries

Do Infants Learn Words From Statistics? Evidence From English‐Learning Infants Hearing Italian

One language or two? Navigating cross‐language conflict in statistical word segmentation

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