Louann GerkenThe University of Arizona | UA
Louann Gerken
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (100)
Purpose
The experiment reported here compared two hypotheses for the poor statistical and artificial grammar learning often seen in children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment). The procedural learning deficit hypothesis states that implicit learning of rule-based input is impaired, wher...
Phonological and distributional cues to syntax acquisition
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)...
When do children acquire abstract grammatical categories? Studies of 2- to 3-year-olds' productions of complete morphosyntactic paradigms (e.g., all legal determiners with all nouns) suggest relatively later category acquisition, while studies of infant discrimination of grammatical vs. ungrammatical sequences suggest earlier acquisition. However,...
Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II linguistic patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages and more frequent...
Artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigms have proven to be productive and useful to investigate how young infants break into the grammar of their native language(s). The question of when infants first show the ability to learn abstract grammatical rules has been central to theoretical debates about the innate vs. learned nature of grammar. The p...
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...
Some considerations for adding reference back into early language development - Volume 39 Issue 4 - LouAnn Gerken
Infants struggle to apply earlier-demonstrated sound-discrimination abilities to later word learning, attending to non-constrastive acoustic dimensions (e.g., Hay et al., 2015), and not always to contrastive dimensions (e.g., Stager & Werker, 1997). One hint about the nature of infants’ difficulties comes from the observation that input from multip...
In previous work, 11-month-old infants were able to learn rules about the relation of the consonants in CVCV words from just four examples. The rules involved phonetic feature relations (same voicing or same place of articulation), and infants' learning was impeded when pairs of words allowed alternative possible generalizations (e.g. two words bot...
Though language manifests linearly, one word at a time, children must learn that words are embedded in constituents, which are in turn embedded in larger constituents. That is, they must learn that syntax is hierarchically structured. Prosody—speech melody and rhythm—is likewise hierarchically organized, with smaller prosodic constituents embedded...
Infants might be better at teasing apart dialects with different language rules when hearing the dialects at different times, since language learners do not always combine input heard at different times. However, no previous research has independently varied the temporal distribution of conflicting language input. Twelve-month-olds heard two artifi...
Infants in the lab can generalize from 2min of language-like input. Given that infants might fail to fully encode so much input, how many examples do they actually need? And if infants only encode a subset of their input at one time, does generalization change when that subset supports multiple generalizations? Exp. 1 asked whether 11-month-olds ge...
There is mounting evidence that prosody facilitates grouping the speech stream into syntactically-relevant units (e.g., Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Soderstrom, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2005). We ask whether prosody's role in syntax acquisition relates to its general acoustic salience or to the learner's acquired knowledge of correlations between pro...
A number of studies with infants and with young children suggest that hearing words produced by multiple talkers helps learners to develop more robust word representations (Richtsmeier et al., 2009; Rost & McMurray, 2009, 2010). Native adult learners, however, do not seem to derive the same benefit from multiple talkers. A word-learning study with...
Learning to parse the speech stream into syntactic constituents is a crucial prerequisite to adult-like sentence comprehension, and prosody is one source of information that could be used for this task. To test the role of prosody in facilitating constituent learning, 19-month-olds were familiarized with non-word sentences with 1-clause (ABCDEF) or...
According to the Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis, infants use prosody to support syntax acquisition (Morgan, 1986). Our previous work provides evidence that infants treat prosodically-marked units as moveable constituents. In order to investigate the mechanism underlying this effect, we tested Japanese-acquiring infants on their ability to use pr...
Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization. One is via a process of noting similarities shared by several examples. Alternatively, generalization may reflect an implicit desire to explain the input. The latter view suggests that generalization mig...
In spoken language, particularly of the infant-directed variety, clauses are marked with prosodic cues, such as final lengthening and pitch resets at boundaries (e.g., Soderstrom et al., 2008). Though prosody is specific to language, similar acoustic cues mark phrase boundaries in music, and infants are sensitive to the correlation of these cues at...
Phonetic variation between speakers promotes generalization when a listener is learning new speech sounds or new word forms (Lively et al., 1993; Richtsmeier et al., 2009; Rost and McMurray, 2009, 2010). In the latter two studies, infant learners were better able to discriminate newly learned words produced by new talkers when trained with multiple...
Purpose:
Children learning language conceptualize the nature of input they receive in ways that allow them to understand and construct utterances they have never heard before. This study was designed to illuminate the types of information children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) focus on to develop their conceptualizations and...
Rational models of human perception and cognition have allowed researchers new ways to look at learning and the ability to make inferences from data. But how good are such models at accounting for developmental change? In this chapter, we address this question in the domain of language development, focusing on the speed with which developmental cha...
Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form (la noun-a and el noun-o). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determin...
While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not stipulate...
Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spu...
The question addressed by this research is how humans acquire the internalized, mental categories that reflect the phonemes 1 of their language. That humans have such categories is evidenced by the fact that, for example, English speakers immediately recognize pear and bear as being different words. This
phonological abstractness of these initial phonetic categories acquired in infancy. One study by Jusczyk and colleagues (1999) found that 9-month-old infants are ,sensitive to whether or not a ,set of sounds shares phonological features, indicating that by this young age infants have already developed featural representations. The question we ask i...
Unlabelled:
Phonotactic frequency effects on word production are thought to reflect accumulated experience with a language. Here we demonstrate that frequency effects can also be obtained through short-term manipulations of the input to children. We presented children with nonwords in an experiment that systematically manipulated English phonotact...
Adults' phonotactic learning is affected by perceptual biases. One such bias concerns learning of constraints affecting groups of sounds: all else being equal, learning constraints affecting a natural class (a set of sounds sharing some phonetic characteristic) is easier than learning a constraint affecting an arbitrary set of sounds. This perceptu...
The experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language pr...
Unlabelled:
An implicit learning paradigm was used to assess children's sensitivity to syllable stress information in an artificial language. Study 1 demonstrated that preschool children, with and without specific language impairment (SLI), can generalize patterns of stress heard during a brief period of familiarization, and can also abstract unde...
Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AAdi or AdiA) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the narrowe...
This chapter examines evidence that adults and infants can learn protocategories through morphological paradigms in which a subset of the categories are double-marked. It is possible that the requirement for double-marking of categories provides evidence for analogy as a category learning mechanism. Experimental results allow for a refinement of fa...
Children's early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent (pre...
Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining generalizati...
Unlabelled:
Two experiments investigated the ability of adults with a history of language-based learning disability (hLLD) and their normal language (NL) peers to learn prosodic patterns of a novel language. Participants were exposed to stimuli from an artificial language and tested on items that required generalization of the stress patterns and...
Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by respondin...
The mechanism that allows learners to generalize over linguistic input and its relation to constraints on possible generalizations was explored in three experiments. Infants were familiarized briefly with words exhibiting stress patterns generated by a set of ordered principles, and then tested on new words that were either consistent or inconsiste...
An extensive body of research on child speech shows that children are sensitive to phonotactic probabilities. The general finding is that children produce native or high probability phonotactic sequences more accurately than non-native or low probability sequences (Beckman & Edwards, 1999; Edwards & Beckman, 2008; Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004;...
Prosodic cues are used to clarify sentence structure and meaning. Two studies, one of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and one of adults with a history of learning disabilities, were designed to determine whether individuals with poor language skills recognize prosodic cues on par with their normal-language peers.
Participants were...
Learners exposed to an artificial language recognize its abstract structural regularities when instantiated in a novel vocabulary (e.g., Gómez, Gerken, & Schvaneveldt, 2000; Tunney & Altmann, 2001). We asked whether such sensitivity accelerates subsequent learning, and enables acquisition of more complex structure. In Experiment 1, pre-exposure to...
To assess how prosodic prominence and hierarchical foot structure influence segmental and articulatory aspects of speech production, specifically segmental accuracy and variability, and oral movement trajectory variability.
Thirty individuals participated: 10 young adults, 10 children who are normally developing, and 10 children diagnosed with spec...
The purpose of this experiment was to determine if nonreferential morphophonological information was sufficient to facilitate the learning of gender subcategories (i.e., masculine vs. feminine) in individuals with normal language (NL) and those with a history of language-based learning disabilities (HLD).
Thirty-two adults listened for 18 min to a...
Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how learne...
The recent language acquisition literature has revealed powerful, domain-general learning mechanisms that rely on frequency and distributional properties of the input. A second set of research investigates generalization of learned patterns to new input. The relationship between these two bodies is not entirely clear. The present paper demonstrates...
Parallels between cross-linguistic and child language data have been used to support a theory of language development in which acquisition is mediated by universal grammar (Universal Grammar Hypothesis—UGH). However, structures that are frequent across languages are also typically the most frequent within a specific language. This confounding of cr...
Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, Ameri...
This chapter considers the question of how language might develop in an individual learner. Any adequate theory of language development must also take a position on how language development in individuals is related to linguistic ability in our species. The chapter also considers both the human learner as a biological and psychological entity and h...
The field of infant speech perception emerged in the early 1970s as new techniques became available to assess young infants' sophisticated discriminative capacities. Pe-ter W. Jusczyk, who died in 2001, was involved in the first studies of infant speech perception and became over the next 30 years the most prolific and influential con-tributor to r...
Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3- a...
This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and c...
When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on outpu...
Unlabelled:
Two-year-olds with normally developing language (NL) and older children with specific language impairment (SLI) omit initial weak syllables from words (e.g., "banana" approximately "nana"). Previous research revealed a phonetic "trace" of syllables omitted by children with NL (Carter, 1999; Carter & Gerken, submitted for publication)....
For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showi...
Dr LouAnn Gerken obtained her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1987. Her first academic position was at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she was exposed to the field of infant speech perception by the late Peter W Jusczyk. Her research career has focused on issues ranging from whether toddlers who fail to produce gr...
Unlabelled:
Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 adults who lacked a personal or familial history of L/LD participated in a study designed to test sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. In an exposure phase, participants heard word s...
For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showi...
The rapidity with which children acquire language is one of the mysteries of human cognition. A view held widely for the past 30 years is that children master language by means of a language-specific learning device. An earlier proposal, which has generated renewed interest, is that children make use of domain-general, associative learning mechanis...
In two experiments, we examined the extent to which knowledge of sequential dependencies and/or patterns of repeating elements is used during transfer in artificial grammar learning. According to one view of transfer, learners abstract the grammar's sequential dependencies and then learn a mapping to new vocabulary at test (Dienes, Altmann, & Gao,...
Four experiments used the head-turn preference procedure to assess whether infants could extract and remember information from auditory strings produced by a miniature artificial grammar. In all four experiments, infants generalized to new structure by discriminating new grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones after less than 2 min exposure to...
In order to begin to learn a language, young children must be able to locate and distinguish linguistic units in the speech they hear. A number of cues in the speech stream may aid them in this task. Some cues, such as frequently occurring grammatical morphemes and prosodic changes at linguistic boundaries are inherent in the language. Other cues,...
Grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs, provide potentially useful information to language learners. However, children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently fail to produce grammatical morphemes, raising questions about their sensitivity to them. To address this issue, two experiments were conducted in which 3- to...
The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segm...
This tutorial presents an overview of prosody and its application to specific language impairment. First, prosody is defined as both a phonological and acoustic phenomenon. Prosody is further explored through a review of research concerning perception and production of prosody in the normally developing child and in the child with specific language...
We discuss and debunk five common assumptions about the interrelation of semantics, syntax, and frequency during sentence processing. In the course of this, we explore the implications of the view that syntax is assigned as the last stage of comprehension rather than the first: Statistically based perceptual strategies propose an initial semantic r...
Previous research on children's production of function morphemes demonstrated an effect of meter, such that syllabic morphemes that fit a Strong–weak metrical template were omitted less frequently than morphemes not fitting such a template. The current research addressed the question of whether all omissions of syllabic function morphemes occur whe...
Research in prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonologic...
There has been recent interest in the role of prosody in language acquisition as well as in adult sentence processing. Although the specific questions about prosody asked in these two domains may appear to differ, there are at least three basic issues that they have in common. These include the role of prosody in segmentation (i.e., deciding whethe...
Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults...
Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability
in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail
to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults...
A linguistic factor governing the assignment of English lexical stress is syllable weight. Heavy syllables which have either a long (tense) vowel or are closed with a consonant are heavy and automatically bear stress. Are infants sensitive to this aspect of the English stress system? Previous research by Jusczyk, Cutler, and Redanz (1993) showed th...
Although it is well established that melodic contour (ascending vs. descending) and modality (major vs. minor) evoke consistent emotional responses in adult listeners, the mechanisms underlying musical affect are unknown. One possibility is that the mechanisms are based on innate perceptual abilities (e.g., Helmholtz, 1885/1954). Another possibilit...
The Head-Turn Preference Procedure (HPP) is valuable for testing perception of sustained auditory materials, particularly speech. This article presents a detailed description of the current version of HPP, new evidence of the objectivity of measurements within it, and an account of recent modifications.
Young children learning English as well as many other languages frequently omit weakly stressed syllables from multisyllabic words. In particular, they are more likely to omit weak syllables from word-initial positions than from word-internal or -final positions. For example, the weak syllable of a weak-strong (WS) word like giraffe is much more li...
According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts sugge...
How can children use prosodic information such as pausing and pitch resetting to infer syntactic structure? This work considers the possibility that they do so by first constructing a prosodic representation similar to ones suggested by recent linguistic theory (e.g., Hayes, 1989; Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1981). The research examines 2-year-o...
Previous studies have demonstrated that children are aware of the function morphemes in their language despite their failure to produce them. However, none of these studies tested whether children are aware of the linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Only if children are aware of such co-occurrence patterns could they u...
Young English speakers often omit sentential subjects but infrequently omit objects. In this paper I consider five accounts for these omissions that differ in the explanation of why children make omissions (grammar versus production constraints) and what causes the asymmetry in subject and object omissions.Hyams, 1986 and Hyams, 1987, Paper present...
Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for
segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for
labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues...
A study investigated the hypothesis that children are sensitive to functors in language and only omit them due to factors specific to speech production and after having analyzed them as separate morphemes. This hypothesis was tested as an alternative to two existing hypotheses concerning children's selective listening for content words and for stre...
We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that ‘c-command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains w...
12 CHAPTER 1: Thesis Introduction 1.0 INTRODUCTION 14 1.1 PERCEPTUAL CENTER BACKGROUND 16 1.1.1 Morton, Marcus, and Frankish (1976): The P-center Discovery and Basic Concepts 16 1.2 PREVIOUS P-CENTER RESEARCH 21 1.2.1 Initial Consonant Experiments 21 1.2.1.1 Fowler (1979) - Production 22 1.2.1.1.1 Metronome/Nonmetronome Tasks: Methodology 23 1.2.1....
Projects
Projects (2)
The proposed project compares infants' and adults' abilities to learn three types of linguistic generalizations that have parallels to well-studied generalizations outside of language. Shepard, Hovland,
and Jenkins (1961) observed that adults who are given feedback are able to learn single feature (Type I) visual categories more easily than Exclusive OR (Type II) categories, which they learn more easily than
Family Resemblance (Type IV) categories. Interestingly, recent research shows this same Type I > II > IV order for the frequency of phonological patterns across human language. Recent research from our
lab indicates that 11-month-olds are highly adept at learning Type II linguistic generalizations, and the current proposal aims to compare their ability to learn Type I and Type IV generalizations as well, with
the goal of determining if infant learning mirrors the frequency with which linguistic rule types occur in natural language.
Other recent research shows that adults are not very adept at Type II linguistic generalizations compared with Type IV generalizations. The proposal explores one hypothesis for the difference in performance on
Type II generalizations between infants and adults: namely that infants' smaller processing window causes them to attend to within word generalizations, which are important for Type II category learning,
whereas adults attend to between-word generalizations which are more important for Type IV generalizations.