Preschoolers Flexibly Adapt to Linguistic Input in a Noisy Channel

Yurovsky, Daniel; Case, Sarah; Frank, Michael C.

doi:10.1177/0956797616668557

Cited by 30 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Such a strategy corresponds to the categorize-and-discard model suggested by Bushong and Jaeger (2019a) and the Now-or-Never bottleneck suggested by Christiansen and Chater (2016). While this explanation may seem incompatible with the idea of a general attraction to context in Danes, it is compatible with the observation -also made for Norwegians -that linguistic processing strategies are flexibly adapted to the task at hand (Gibson et al, 2017;Trecca et al, 2019;Yurovsky et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

Ishkhanyan¹,

Christiansen²,

Højen³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Are all languages processed in the same way, or might typological variation cause systematic differences between languages? We explore this question through a cross-linguistic comparison of categorical perception in two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We employ drift diffusion models to reveal cross-linguistic differences in the role of context: Danish – a more phonologically-opaque language – shows equally strong context effects of both near and distal context, while Norwegian shows stronger context effect of near than distal context. We argue that the difference is due to a processing strategy: due to the more transparent sound structure of their language, Norwegians pay more attention to local acoustic information - while Danes, due to the opaque phonology of Danish, seem to use later-occurring contextual information to a larger extent. Indeed, when forcing participants to delay their decision until the full information is available, Norwegians show choice patterns more similar to those of Danes. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-linguistic studies, as even closely related languages like Danish and Norwegian, appear to be processed differently contingent on individual properties of the specific language.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

Ishkhanyan¹,

Christiansen²,

Højen³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Recent developmental work shows that, like adults, preschoolers will flexibly adjust how they interpret ambiguous sentences (e.g., "I had carrots and bees for dinner.") by integrating information about the reliability of the incoming perceptual information with their expectations about the speaker (Yurovsky et al, 2017). While children's behavior paralleled adults' in this study, they relied more on top-down expectations about the speaker, perhaps because their perceptual representations were noisier.…”

Section: The Present Studiesmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that children and adults handle this sort of noise in the signal by integrating what they perceive with their prior beliefs about the speaker's intended meaning (Fourtassi & Frank, 2017;Gibson, Bergen, & Piantadosi, 2013;Yurovsky, Case, & Frank, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children flexibly seek visual information during signed and spoken language comprehension

MacDonald¹,

Marchman²,

Fernald³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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During grounded language comprehension, listeners must link the incoming linguistic signal to the visual world despite noise in the input. Information gathered through visual fixations can facilitate understanding. But do listeners flexibly seek supportive visual information? Here, we propose that even young children can adapt their gaze and actively gather information that supports their language understanding. We present two case studies of eye movements during real-time language processing where the value of fixating on a social partner varies across different contexts. First, compared to children learning spoken English (n=80), young American Sign Language (ASL) learners (n=30) delayed gaze shifts away from a language source and produced a higher proportion of language-consistent eye movements. This result suggests that ASL learners adapt to dividing attention between language and referents, which both compete for processing via the same channel: vision. Second, English-speaking preschoolers (n=39) and adults (n=31) delayed the timing of gaze shifts away from a speaker’s face while processing language in a noisy auditory environment. This delay resulted in a higher proportion of language-consistent gaze shifts. These results suggest that young listeners can adapt their gaze to seek supportive visual information from social partners during real-time language comprehension.

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“…This kind of compensation has been observed with adults (Mattys et al, 2012;, and recent evidence suggests that it starts in childhood (K. MacDonald, Marchman, Fernald, & Frank, 2018;Yurovsky, Case, & Frank, 2017).…”

Section: Patterns Of Optimality and Sub-optimalitymentioning

confidence: 67%

How Optimal is Word-Referent Identification Under Multimodal Uncertainty?

Fourtassi¹,

Frank²

2018

Preprint

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Identifying a spoken word in a referential context requires both the ability to integrate multimodal input and the ability to reason under uncertainty. How do these tasks interact with one another? We study how adults identify novel words under joint uncertainty in the auditory and visual modalities and we propose an ideal observer model of how cues in these modalities are combined optimally. Model predictions are tested in four experiments where recognition is made under various sources of uncertainty. We found that participants use both auditory and visual cues to recognize novel words. When the signal is not distorted with environmental noise, participants weight the auditory and visual cues optimally, that is, according to the relative reliability of each modality. In contrast, when one modality has noise added to it, human perceivers systematically prefer the unperturbed modality to a greater extent than the optimal model does. This work extends the literature on perceptual cue combination to the case of word recognition in a referential context. In addition, this context offers a link to the study of multimodal information in word meaning learning.

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Preschoolers Flexibly Adapt to Linguistic Input in a Noisy Channel

Cited by 30 publications

References 29 publications

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

Children flexibly seek visual information during signed and spoken language comprehension

How Optimal is Word-Referent Identification Under Multimodal Uncertainty?

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