Learning builds on learning: Infants’ use of native language sound patterns to learn words

Abstract

The present research investigated how infants apply prior knowledge of environmental regularities to support new learning. The experiments tested whether infants could exploit experience with native language (English) phonotactic patterns to facilitate associating sounds with meanings during word learning. Fourteen-month-olds heard fluent speech that contained cues for detecting target words; they were embedded in sequences that occur across word boundaries. A separate group heard the target words embedded without word boundary cues. Infants then participated in an object label-learning task. With the opportunity to use native language patterns to segment the target words, infants subsequently learned the labels. Without this experience, infants failed. Novice word learners can take advantage of early learning about sounds scaffold lexical development.

Finding patterns and learning words: Infant phonotactic knowledge is associated with vocabulary size

“…We propose that if infants with small vocabularies have not yet developed specialization for processing native phonotactics, they may have difficulty in exploiting the ways in which phonotactic information supports language acquisition and processing. Knowledge of which consonant clusters can and cannot occur at word onsets and offsets provides cues to word boundaries, facilitating rapid word recognition in adults (McQueen, 1998) and facilitating word segmentation and word learning in infants (Graf Estes, 2014; Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001). In addition, knowledge of phonotactic patterns may help to constrain word learning by promoting infants’ focus on the sound sequences that form possible words and allowing them to disregard forms that are not possible or likely to label concepts (Graf Estes et al, 2011; MacKenzie et al, 2012).…”

“…Graf Estes (2014) explicitly tested how infants use early phonotactic cues to support the process of linking new word forms with meanings during lexical acquisition. In the experiment, 14-month-old infants listened to passages containing two target words.…”

Word learning in 14-month-old monolinguals and bilinguals: Challenges and methodological opportunities

“…Word learning is a complex process that begins to unfold over the first two years of life. Past research, using a variety of experimental designs, has provided important insights into word learning in both monolingual and bilingual infants (e.g., Fennell & Byers-Heinlein, 2014;Graf Estes, 2014;Mattock et al, 2010;Singh et al, 2018;Werker et al, 1998;Woodward et al, 1994). However, a new understanding of research best practices highlights the limitations of our traditional methodological and statistical approaches (Bergmann et al, 2018;Oakes, 2017).…”

The Perception of Stress Pattern in Young Cochlear Implanted Children: An EEG Study

“…Fortunately, infants are brilliant in grasping regularities (Mueller et al, 2012 ; Krogh et al, 2013 ) and language offers rule-based cues for the identification of word boundaries. Phonotactic rules restrict the place where a word boundary may be (Friederici and Wessels, 1993 ; Mersad and Nazzi, 2011 ; Rossi et al, 2011 ; Graf Estes, 2014 ), as certain phoneme combinations are simply not valid at the beginning or at the end of word for a specific language. For example, German phonotactic rules do not allow the segmentation of “lautes Kreischen” (German for “loud screech”) into [laute |skreischen], because/skr/ is not a valid word onset phoneme combination in German, whereas it is perfectly acceptable in English (e.g., “screech” or “screen”).…”