Statistical frequency in perception affects children’s lexical production

Richtsmeier, Peter T.; Gerken, Lou Ann; Goffman, Lisa; Hogan, Tiffany P.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.02.009

Cited by 77 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Most relevant to the present study, typically developing children produce non-words with fewer errors when they had heard them spoken by multiple talkers (Richtsmeier et al, 2009). In perception of synthetic speech, listeners generalize better to novel stimuli when their training set is more varied (Greenspan et al, 1988).…”

Section: What Can Acoustic Variability Tell Us About the Nature Of Inmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

Quam

Knight

Gerken

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Section: What Can Acoustic Variability Tell Us About the Nature Of Inmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

Quam

Knight

Gerken

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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“…McMurray (2009, 2010) showed that non-contrastive talker variability helped 14-month-olds distinguish highly-similar words in a word learning task. Richtsmeier, Gerken, Goffman, and Hogan (2009) found that preschoolers more accurately imitated nonsense words when they were heard in a variety of voices. In addition to these acoustically/phonetically-driven effects, preschool-aged and older children seem to draw semantic information from talker variation.…”

Section: Development Of Talker Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers’ flexible use of talker information during word learning

Creel¹

2014

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…These are listed in Appendix Table 1A. Previous studies have demonstrated that multiple talkers compared to single talkers facilitate word learning (Richtsmeier, Gerken, Goffman, & Hogan, 2009;Rost & McMurray, 2009. Motivated by these findings, the auditory material in the two familiarization phases were recorded by two different talkers, both of whom were native speakers of Russian.…”

Section: Phase I Familiarization Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Input Variability Facilitates Unguided Subcategory Learning in Adults

Eidsvåg

Austad

Plante

et al. 2015

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: This experiment investigated whether input variability would affect initial learning of noun gender subcategories in an unfamiliar, natural language (Russian), as it is known to assist learning of other grammatical forms. Method: Forty adults (20 men, 20 women) were familiarized with examples of masculine and feminine Russian words. Half of the participants were familiarized with 32 different root words in a high-variability condition. The other half were familiarized with 16 different root words, each repeated twice for a total of 32 presentations in a high-repetition condition. Participants were tested on untrained members of the category to assess generalization.Familiarization and testing was completed 2 additional times. Results: Only participants in the high-variability group showed evidence of learning after an initial period of familiarization. Participants in the high-repetition group were able to learn after additional input. Both groups benefited when words included 2 cues to gender compared to a single cue. Conclusions:The results demonstrate that the degree of input variability can influence learners' ability to generalize a grammatical subcategory (noun gender) from a natural language. In addition, the presence of multiple cues to linguistic subcategory facilitated learning independent of variability condition.A major theoretical issue concerning language learning is how to structure the input in ways that best facilitate learning. In the present experiment, we investigated whether input variability might facilitate the learning of grammatical word forms in an unfamiliar language. A growing body of research has found that increasing the variability in the input to learners is beneficial for the learning of various linguistic skills, including word learning (Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, & Schiffer, 2010), speech sound categorization (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002;Sadakata & McQueen, 2013), and reading (Apfelbaum, Hazeltine, & McMurray, 2013). Variability in spoken input has also been found to facilitate grammar learning and promote generalization of the grammar (Gómez, 2002;Torkildsen, Dailey, Aguilar, Gómez, & Plante, 2013). The effect of variability on learning grammatical structures was demonstrated in a seminal study by Gómez (2002), who examined the unguided learning of nonadjacent dependencies using an artificial language. A nonadjacent dependency describes a relation between two elements separated by one or more intervening elements. This type of dependency has many counterparts in natural language. For example, the English present progressive verb tense (e.g., is singing) involves a nonadjacent dependency between is and ing (Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998). Gómez (2002) used similar aXb grammatical forms in which the element a (a nonword) predicts the element b (a different nonword) with any number of nonwords (X ) occurring between the a and b elements. The variability of input was manipulated by drawing the middle element (X ) from a pool of two, six, 12, or 24 different X elements. The r...

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Statistical frequency in perception affects children’s lexical production

Cited by 77 publications

References 29 publications

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning

Preschoolers’ flexible use of talker information during word learning

Input Variability Facilitates Unguided Subcategory Learning in Adults

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