Lexical knowledge boosts statistically-driven speech segmentation.

Palmer, Shekeila D.; Hutson, James H.; White, Laurence; Mattys, Sven L.

doi:10.1037/xlm0000567

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…That is, familiarity with some linguistic features in the input boosts learners' ability to track statistical regularities overall from two language inputs. This finding is in line with recent research demonstrating that familiarity with features in the input benefits learning new regularities in that input (Antoniou et al, 2015;Palmer et al, 2019;Stä rk et al, 2023).…”

Section: How Lexical Tone Impacted Learningsupporting

confidence: 92%

Lexical Tone as a Cue in Statistical Word Learning from Bilingual Input

Benitez²

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Learners can track word-referent co-occurrences across individually-ambiguous naming events to form correct word-referent mappings, termed statistical word learning (SWL). Prior research largely focuses on learning from a single language input, where a referent co-occurs with a single word (1:1 mapping). Here, we tested adults’ SWL from a simulated bilingual environment, where one referent co-occurred with two words (2:1 mapping) and the two words were either differentiated by a linguistic cue (Mandarin lexical tones, Cued condition) or not (Uncued condition). Results showed that in the Cued condition, Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 38) outperformed Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 56) and English monolinguals (N = 55), while Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals performed similarly. The three groups did not differ in the Uncued condition. Self-reported learning confidence and strategies showed limited conscious awareness of learning. Results demonstrate that familiarity with a linguistic cue boosts overall statistical word learning from bilingual input.

show abstract

Section: How Lexical Tone Impacted Learningsupporting

confidence: 92%

Lexical Tone as a Cue in Statistical Word Learning from Bilingual Input

Benitez²

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finally, 59 studies in the meta‐analysis comprise conditions designed to disrupt learning: for example, studies that divided participant attention (Batterink & Paller, 2019), increased cognitive load (Palmer, Hutson, White, & Mattys, 2019), or presented statistical cues that conflicted with lexical stress (Fernandes, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007). These studies did not significantly decrement learning in the whole sample ( F (1, 634) = 2.34, p = .13).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical Learning of Language: A Meta‐Analysis Into 25 Years of Research

Isbilen

Christiansen

2022

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Statistical learning is a key concept in our understanding of language acquisition. Ample work has highlighted its role in numerous linguistic functions—yet statistical learning is not a unitary construct, and its consistency across different language properties remains unclear. In a meta‐analysis of auditory‐linguistic statistical learning research spanning the last 25 years, we evaluated how learning varies across different language properties in infants, children, and adults and surveyed the methodological trends in the literature. We found robust learning across stimuli (syllables, words, etc.) in infants, and across stimuli and structures (adjacent dependencies, non‐adjacent dependencies, etc.) in adults, with larger effect sizes when multiple cues were present. However, the analysis also showed significant publication bias and revealed a tendency toward using a narrow range of simplified language properties, including in the strength of the transitional probabilities used during training. Bayes factor analyses revealed prevalent data insensitivity of moderators commonly hypothesized to impact learning, such as the amount of exposure and transitional probability strength, which contradict core theoretical assumptions in the field. Methodological factors, such as the tasks used at test, also significantly impacted effect sizes in adults and children, suggesting that choice of task may critically constrain current theories of how statistical learning operates. Collectively, our results suggest that auditory‐linguistic statistical learning has the kind of robustness needed to play a foundational role in language acquisition, but that more research is warranted to reveal its full potential.

show abstract

“…This interpretation is supported by recent findings, suggesting that children learn better in unbalanced than balanced distributions (i.e., in Zipf distributions), as it occurs in natural languages ( Lavi-Rotbain and Arnon, 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ). Due to cognitive limitations, the children’s immature brain might simply rely on the use of a more “economic” strategy, which may even have facilitated the learning of lower frequency elements later on ( Bortfeld et al, 2005 ; Palmer et al, 2019 ; Lavi-Rotbain and Arnon, 2021 ; Soares et al, 2021a ). Future research should contrast these two accounts by comparing the processing of homogenous speech streams (containing either low-TP or high-TP “words”) to heterogenous (mixed) streams, manipulating the frequency of occurrence of each token.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Words While Listening to Syllables: Electrophysiological Correlates of Statistical Learning in Children and Adults

Soares

Gutiérrez-Domínguez

Lages

et al. 2022

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units (words). Statistical learning (SL), the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) while 5-year-old children and young adults (university students) were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability (high vs. low) to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning (aSL) might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development.

show abstract

Lexical knowledge boosts statistically-driven speech segmentation.

Cited by 7 publications

References 32 publications

Lexical Tone as a Cue in Statistical Word Learning from Bilingual Input

Lexical Tone as a Cue in Statistical Word Learning from Bilingual Input

Statistical Learning of Language: A Meta‐Analysis Into 25 Years of Research

Learning Words While Listening to Syllables: Electrophysiological Correlates of Statistical Learning in Children and Adults

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About