3 research outputs found
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How infants map nonce phrases to scenes with objects and predicates.
When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object)more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? What if the context renders verb-predicate and noun-object interpretationsequally plausible? We examined 14-15-month-oldsâ capacity for linking semantic elements of scenes with simple bisyllabicnonce utterances. Each syllable either referred to the object, or the objectâs motion. Infants heard the syllables in either a VS-or SV-consistent order. Learning was tested using 2AFC language-guided looking. Infants learned the nouns and verbs equallywell, showing no bias favoring nouns. In all conditions, infants learned the meaning of the utterance-final syllable, but not theinitial one, suggesting that noun or verb biases played a smaller role than utterance position when noun- and verb-learning wereequally supported by context
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Outputs as inputs: Sequential Models of the Products of Infant 'Statistical Learning' of Language
To explore whether current notions of statistically-based
language learning could successfully scale to infantsâ
linguistic experiences âin the wildâ, we implemented a
statistical-clustering word-segmentation model (Saffran et al.,
1997) and sent its outputs to an implementation of a âframeâ
based form class tagger (Mintz, 2003) and, separately, to a
simple word-order heuristic parser (Gervain et al., 2008). We
tested this pipeline model on various input types, ranging
from quite idealized (orthographic words) to more naturalistic
resyllabified corpora. We ask how these modeled capacities
work together when they receive the noisy outputs of
upstream word finding processes as input, which more closely
resembles the scenario infants face in language acquisition