The role of experience in children’s discrimination of unfamiliar languages

Abstract

Five- and six-year-old children (n = 160) participated in three studies designed to explore language discrimination. After an initial exposure period (during which children heard either an unfamiliar language, a familiar language, or music), children performed an ABX discrimination task involving two unfamiliar languages that were either similar (Spanish vs. Italian) or different (Spanish vs. Mandarin). On each trial, participants heard two sentences spoken by two individuals, each spoken in an unfamiliar language. The pair was followed by a third sentence spoken in one of the two languages. Participants were asked to judge whether the third sentence was spoken by the first speaker or the second speaker. Across studies, both the difficulty of the discrimination contrast and the relation between exposure and test materials affected children’s performance. In particular, language discrimination performance was facilitated by an initial exposure to a different unfamiliar language, suggesting that experience can help tune children’s attention to the relevant features of novel languages.

Lost and Found: Decline and Reemergence of Non-Native Vowel Discrimination in the First Year of Life

“…We used tokens from four different female speakers during habituation. Speaker variability has been argued to enhance generalization of abstract features in the process of developing phonetic categories (Lively, Logan, & Pisoni, 1993;Potter & Saffran, 2015;Rost & McMurray, 2009). In daily speech perception infants need to extract acoustic information that is relevant to phonemic contrasts, while redundant information, not contributing to meaningful differences, needs to be ignored.…”

The influence of memory on visual perception in infants, children, and adults

“…That is, through experience, learning can become more constrained (Zettersten et al, 2020), and weaker perceptual biases may allow infants and young children to be more receptive to learning from unfamiliar and unexpected events. Infants and young children are able to rapidly incorporate novel experience into perceptual judgments (Maye et al, 2002;Potter & Saffran, 2015), and over development, increases in prior knowledge may impede their ability to perceive less-expected events and to acquire new (and potentially unexpected) information. Thus, a reduced reliance on prior perception may allow infants and young children to absorb new knowledge, even if the information is inconsistent with the child's previous experience.…”

Children’s emerging ability to discriminate L1-varieties

“…In addition, this test proved to be fairly demanding on the younger children’s cognitive resources. We thus had to limit the number of trials to four (similarly to Potter & Saffran, 2015).…”