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Human vocalizations contain both voice characteristics that convey who is talking and sophisticated linguistic structure. Inter-talker variation in voice characteristics is traditionally seen as posing a challenge for infant language learners, who must disregard this variation when the task is to detect talkers' shared linguistic conventions. Howev...
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Acceptability judgments are the standard methodology for investigating syntactic variation. While acceptability judgments have been shown to be reliable in cases of assumed stable variation, there has been little discussion of how syntactic 'change' plays out in judgment tasks. This is despite evidence from sociolinguistics that at the end of a cha...
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... In fact, limited talker variability seems to be particularly useful for learning talker-specific information (see also Choi & Shukla, 2021). For example, when learners are presented with multiple underlying regularities (i.e., artificial speech streams), a change in talker that happens in tandem with the change in regularity helps learners separately track each set of regularity statistics, which they are unable to do when both speech streams (with the different regularities) are produced by the same talker (Antovich & Graf Estes, 2018;Gonzales, Gerken, & Gómez, 2018;Weiss, Gerfen, & Mitchel, 2009). ...
Contending with talker variability has been found to lead to processing costs but also benefits by focusing learners on invariant properties of the signal, indicating that talker variability acts as a desirable difficulty. That is, talker variability may lead to initial costs followed by long‐term benefits for retention and generalization. Adult participants learned an artificial grammar affording learning of multiple components in two experiments varying in difficulty. They learned from one, two, or eight talkers and were tested at three time points. The eight‐talker condition did not impact learning. The two‐talker condition negatively impacted some aspects of learning, but only under more difficult conditions. Generalization of the grammatical dependency was difficult. Thus, we discovered that high and limited talker variability can differentially impact artificial grammar learning. However, talker variability did not act as a desirable difficulty in the current paradigm as the few evidenced costs were not related to long‐term benefits.
... Although our framing of the word learning problem as also involving social inference is a novel perspective with respect to models of word learning, it is consistent with a large body of literature showing that even very young children have substantial sociolinguistic competence. For example, 12 month old have been shown to use talker specific voice characteristics to learn talker-dependent linguistic structure, successfully generalizing grammatical rules learned from a single talker to sentences from novel talkers (Gonzales et al., 2018). ...
We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.
... Seidl, Onishi, and Cristia (2014) reported facilitative effects of talker variability, for infants at 4 and 11 months, on phonotactic-pattern learning: discrimination of nonce words that were phonotactically compatible vs. incompatible with familiarization. Infants use talker differences to track grammatical-like rules (Gonzales, Gerken, & Gómez, 2018), but apparently not to track phonological statistics (Benitez, Bulgarelli, Byers-Heinlein, Saffran, & Weiss, 2020). Richtsmeier, Gerken, & Ohala (2011) found facilitation from talker and word-type frequency on preschoolers' production of phonotactic sequences (see also Richtsmeier, Gerken, Goffman, & Hogan, 2009). ...
This article reviews research on when acoustic-phonetic variability facilitates, inhibits, or does not impact perceptual development for spoken language, to illuminate mechanisms by which variability aids learning of language sound patterns. We first summarize structures and sources of variability. We next present proposed mechanisms to account for how and why variability impacts learning. Finally, we review effects of variability in the domains of speech-sound category and pattern learning; word-form recognition and word learning; and accent processing. Variability can be helpful, harmful, or neutral depending on the learner's age and learning objective. Irrelevant variability can facilitate children's learning, particularly for early learning of words and phonotactic rules. For speech-sound change detection and word-form recognition, children seem either unaffected or impaired by irrelevant variability. At the same time, inclusion of variability in training can aid generalization. Variability between accents may slow learning—but with the longer-term benefits of improved comprehension of multiple accents. By highlighting accent as a form of acoustic-phonetic variability and considering impacts of dialect prestige on children's learning, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of how exposure to multiple accents impacts language development and may have implications for literacy development.
This article is categorized under:
• Linguistics > Language Acquisition
• Psychology > Language
• Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics
Abstract
Acoustic-phonetic variability can be structured in a number of ways. Drawing from laboratory studies and natural settings, the panels depict four possible relationships between speech variability (using voice-onset time as the example dimension) and nonspeech variability (using second-formant frequency as the example dimension). Colors refer to speech-sound category. Rugs indicate frequency of each value on each axis.
... One factor that could have impacted discrimination of /n/ vs. /ŋ/ was the introduction of a novel talker in the test phase. Using a single, novel talker equated the test phases between the two talker conditions (Quam, Knight, & Gerken, 2017;Gonzales, Gerken, & Gómez, 2018;Potter & Saffran, 2017). In both conditions, children had to generalize from the habituation talker(s) to the test talker. ...
To learn speech-sound categories, infants must identify the acoustic dimensions that differentiate categories and selectively attend to them as opposed to irrelevant dimensions. Variability on
irrelevant acoustic dimensions can aid formation of robust categories in infants through adults in tasks such as word learning (e.g., Rost & McMurray, 2009) or speech-sound learning (e.g., Lively,
Logan, & Pisoni, 1993). At the same time, variability sometimes overwhelms learners, interfering with learning and processing. Two prior studies (Kuhl & Miller, 1982; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) found that irrelevant variability sometimes impaired early sound discrimination. We asked whether variability would impair or facilitate discrimination for older infants, comparing 7.5-month-old infants’ discrimination of an early acquired native contrast, /p/ vs. /b/ (in the wordforms /pIm/ vs. /bIm/), in Experiment 1, with an acoustically subtle, non-native contrast, /n/ vs. /ŋ/ (in /nIm/ vs. /ŋIm/), in Experiment 2. Words were spoken by one or four talkers. Infants discriminated the native but not the non-native contrast and there were no significant effects of talker condition. We discuss implications for theories of phonological learning and avenues for future research.
... However, 5-6-year-old children showed some learning of noun particles conditioned on speaker gender in a similar paradigm, even when they were not verbally able to identify the relationship (Samara et al., 2017). And even 12-month-old infants use talker voice to track the relationship between word types in an artificial grammar (Gonzalez, Gerken, & Gomez, 2018). Given that children clearly do learn variation in the real world, artificial language approaches are promising for exploring the conditions (e.g., the types of conditioning contexts, the amount of data, relative frequency of the variants, the number of speakers producing the same kind of variation) under which it is or is not learned. ...
Developmental sociolinguistics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary framework that builds upon theoretical and methodological contributions from multiple disciplines (i.e., sociolinguistics, language acquisition, the speech sciences, developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics). A core assumption of this framework is that language is by its very nature variable, and that much of this variability is informative, as it is (probabilistically) governed by a variety of factors—including linguistic context, social or cultural context, the relationship between speaker and addressee, a language user's geographic origin, and a language user's gender identity. It is becoming increasingly clear that consideration of these factors is absolutely essential to developing realistic and ecologically valid models of language development. Given the central importance of language in our social world, a more complete understanding of early social development will also require a deeper understanding of when and how language variation influences children's social inferences and behavior. As the cross‐pollination between formerly disparate fields continues, we anticipate a paradigm shift in the way many language researchers conceptualize the challenge of early acquisition.
This article is categorized under:
• Linguistics > Linguistic Theory
• Linguistics > Language Acquisition
• Neuroscience > Development
• Psychology > Language
Abstract
The variable nature of input to the child language learner.
... In addition, some studies show that the bilingual experience has minimal impact on children's statistical learning abilities (Yim & Rudoy, 2013), suggesting that bilingual infants could also use learned speech cues at the same pace as monolingual infants. Indeed, prior research shows that bilingual infants can use different prosodic or indexical cues to learn about the linguistic systems of two artificial language (Gervain & Werker, 2013;Gonzales, Gerken, & Gomez, 2018;Tsui, Erickson, Thiessen, & Fennell, 2017). Further, a recent study by Antovich and Graf Estes (2017) examined early word segmentation in a bilingual context using artificial languages. ...
Previous studies show that young monolingual infants use language‐specific cues to segment words in their native language. Here, we asked whether 8 and 10‐month‐old infants (N = 84) have the capacity to segment words in an inter‐mixed bilingual context. Infants heard an English‐French mixed passage that contained one target word in each language, and were then tested on their recognition of the two target words. The English‐monolingual and French‐monolingual infants showed evidence of segmentation in their native language, but not in the other unfamiliar language. As a group, the English‐French bilingual infants segmented in both of their native languages. However, exploratory analyses suggest that exposure to language mixing may play a role in bilingual infants’ segmentation skills. Taken together, these results indicate a close relation between language experience and word segmentation skills.
High frequency words play a key role in language acquisition, with recent work suggesting they may serve both speech segmentation and lexical categorisation. However, it is not yet known whether infants can detect novel high frequency words in continuous speech, nor whether they can use them to help learning for segmentation and categorisation at the same time. For instance, when hearing “you eat the biscuit”, can children use the high-frequency words “you” and “the” to segment out “eat” and “biscuit”, and determine their respective lexical categories? We tested this in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we familiarised 12-month-old infants with continuous artificial speech comprising repetitions of target words , which were preceded by high-frequency marker words that distinguished the targets into two distributional categories. In Experiment 2, we repeated the task using the same language but with additional phonological cues to word and category structure. In both studies, we measured learning with head-turn preference tests of segmentation and categorisation, and compared performance against a control group that heard the artificial speech without the marker words (i.e., just the targets). There was no evidence that high frequency words helped either speech segmentation or grammatical categorisation. However, segmentation was seen to improve when the distributional information was supplemented with phonological cues (Experiment 2). In both experiments, exploratory analysis indicated that infants’ looking behaviour was related to their linguistic maturity (indexed by infants’ vocabulary scores) with infants with high versus low vocabulary scores displaying novelty and familiarity preferences, respectively. We propose that high-frequency words must reach a critical threshold of familiarity before they can be of significant benefit to learning.
Contemporary models of adult speech perception acknowledge that the processing of linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal are interdependent. But when in development does this interdependence first emerge? In the adult literature, one way to demonstrate this relationship has been to examine how language experience affects talker identification. Thus, in this study, 4‐ to 5‐month‐old infants (N = 96) were tested on their ability to tell apart talkers in a familiar language (English) compared to unfamiliar languages (Polish or Spanish). Infants readily distinguished between talkers in the familiar language but not in the unfamiliar languages, supporting the hypothesis that the integrated processing of linguistic and nonlinguistic information in speech is early emerging and robust.
Bilinguals understand when the communication context calls for speaking a particular language and can switch from speaking one language to speaking the other based on such conceptual knowledge. There is disagreement regarding whether conceptually-based language selection is also possible in the listening modality. For example, can bilingual listeners perceptually adjust to changes in pronunciation across languages based on their conceptual understanding of which language they’re currently hearing? We asked French- and Spanish-English bilinguals to identify nonsense monosyllables as beginning with /b/ or /p/, speech categories that French and Spanish speakers pronounce differently than English speakers. We conceptually cued each bilingual group to one of their two languages or the other by explicitly instructing them that the speech items were word onsets in that language, uttered by a native speaker thereof. Both groups adjusted their /b–p/ identification boundary as a function of this conceptual cue to the language context. These results support a bilingual model permitting conceptually-based language selection on both the speaking and listening end of a communicative exchange.
Keywords: language switching, speech perception, top-down processing, neural
network models, rational listener
Purpose:
Statistical learning research seeks to identify the means by which learners, with little perceived effort, acquire the complexities of language. In the past 50 years, numerous studies have uncovered powerful learning mechanisms that allow for learning within minutes of exposure to novel language input.
Method:
We consider the value of information from statistical learning studies that show potential for making treatment of language disorders faster and more effective.
Results:
Available studies include experimental research that demonstrates the conditions under which rapid learning is possible, research showing that these findings apply to individuals with disorders, and translational work that has applied learning principles in treatment and educational contexts. In addition, recent research on memory formation has implications for treatment of language deficits.
Conclusion:
The statistical learning literature offers principles for learning that can improve clinical outcomes for children with language impairment. There is potential for further applications of this basic research that is yet unexplored.
