Learning classes of sounds in infancy

Adults\u27 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 perceptual bias could be a given, for example, the result of innately guided learning; alternatively, it could be due to human learners’ experience with sounds. Using artificial grammars, we investigated whether such a bias arises in development, or whether it is present as soon as infants can learn phonotactics. Seven-month-old English-learning infants fail to generalize a phonotactic pattern involving fricatives and nasals, which does not form a coherent phonetic group, but succeed with the natural class of oral and nasal stops. In this paper, we report an experiment that explored whether those results also follow in a cohort of 4-month-olds. Unlike the older infants, 4-month-olds were able to generalize both groups, suggesting that the perceptual bias that makes phonotactic constraints on natural classes easier to learn is likely the effect of experience

Surprise! Infants consider possible bases of generalization for a single input example

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 might occur when even a single input example is surprising, given the learner's current model of the domain. To test the possibility that infants are able to generalize based on a single example, we familiarized 9-month-olds with a single three-syllable input example that contained either one surprising feature (syllable repetition, Experiment 1) or two features (repetition and a rare syllable, Experiment 2). In both experiments, infants generalized only to new strings that maintained all of the surprising features from familiarization. This research suggests that surprise can promote very rapid generalization. Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization

Prosodic Bootstrapping of Clauses: Is it Language-Specific?

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 prosody to locate clauses in an English-based artificial grammar. The Japanese infants were able to learn from English prosody, suggesting that prosodic bootstrapping relies on prosody's general acoustic properties. It appears that prosodic cues to syntax are robust enough across languages to be used without extensive knowledge of language-specific prosody

Experience with morphosyntactic paradigms allows toddlers to tacitly anticipate overregularized verb forms months before they produce them

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, few of the latter studies have probed category generalization by examining how learners treat gaps in their input, and none have found evidence that learners before the age of 2 years fill gaps in VERB paradigms. Therefore, the three experiments presented here asked whether 16-month-olds tacitly expect to hear forms like breaked by presenting them with overregularized verbs vs. (1) nonce verbs + -ed, (2) real English nouns + -ed and (3) the correct irregular counterparts. The pattern of listening preferences suggests that toddlers anticipate overregularized forms, suggesting that they have a general proto-category VERB, to which they expect the complete set of verb inflections to apply.NSFNational Science Foundation (NSF) [DDIG 1729862, BCS 1724842]12 month embargo; available online 26 June 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]