Lexical competition in young children's word learning

In two experiments, 1.5-year-olds were taught novel words whose sound patterns were phonologically similar to familiar words (novel neighbors) or were not (novel nonneighbors). Learning was tested using a picture-fixation task. In both experiments, children learned the novel nonneighbors but not the novel neighbors. In addition, exposure to the novel neighbors impaired recognition performance on familiar neighbors. Finally, children did not spontaneously use phonological differences to infer that a novel word referred to a novel object. Thus, lexical competition—inhibitory interaction among words in speech comprehension—can prevent children from using their full phonological sensitivity in judging words as novel. These results suggest that word learning in young children, as in adults, relies not only on the discrimination and identification of phonetic categories, but also on evaluating the likelihood that an utterance conveys a new word

Statistical Cues in Language Acquisition: Word Segmentation by Infants

A critical component of language acquisition is the ability to learn from the information present in the language input. In particular, young language learners would benefit from leaming mechanisms capable of utilizing the myriad statistical cues to linguistic structure available in the input. The present study examines eight-month-old infants' use of statistical cues in discovering word boundaries. Computational models suggest that one of the most useful cues in segmenting words out of continuous speech is distributional information: the detection of consistent orderings of sounds. In this paper, we present results suggesting that eight-month-old infants can in fact make use of the order in which sounds occur to discover word-like sequences. The implications of this early ability to detect statistical information in the language input will be discussed with regard to theoretical issues in the field of language acquisition

Enhanced visual statistical learning in adults with autism.

OBJECTIVE: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized as having social engagement and language deficiencies, but a sparing of visuospatial processing and short-term memory (STM), with some evidence of supranormal levels of performance in these domains. The present study expanded on this evidence by investigating the observational learning of visuospatial concepts from patterns of covariation across multiple exemplars. METHOD: Child and adult participants with ASD, and age-matched control participants, viewed multishape arrays composed from a random combination of pairs of shapes that were each positioned in a fixed spatial arrangement. RESULTS: After this passive exposure phase, a posttest revealed that all participant groups could discriminate pairs of shapes with high covariation from randomly paired shapes with low covariation. Moreover, learning these shape-pairs with high covariation was superior in adults with ASD than in age-matched controls, whereas performance in children with ASD was no different than controls. CONCLUSIONS: These results extend previous observations of visuospatial enhancement in ASD into the domain of learning, and suggest that enhanced visual statistical learning may have arisen from a sustained bias to attend to local details in complex arrays of visual features

Infants' goal anticipation during failed and successful reaching actions

The ability to interpret and predict the actions of others is crucial to social interaction and to social, cognitive, and linguistic development. The current study provided a strong test of this predictive ability by assessing (1) whether infants are capable of prospectively processing actions that fail to achieve their intended outcome, and (2) how infants respond to events in which their initial predictions are not confirmed. Using eye tracking, 8‐month‐olds, 10‐month‐olds, and adults watched an actor repeatedly reach over a barrier to either successfully or unsuccessfully retrieve a ball. Ten‐month‐olds and adults produced anticipatory looks to the ball, even when the action was unsuccessful and the actor never achieved his goal. Moreover, they revised their initial predictions in response to accumulating evidence of the actor's failure. Eight‐month‐olds showed anticipatory looking only after seeing the actor successfully grasp and retrieve the ball. Results support a flexible, prospective social information processing ability that emerges during the first year of life. The ability to make predictions about the actions of others is crucial to social interaction and to social, cognitive, and linguistic development. The current study examined this ability in infancy by assessing (1) whether infants can prospectively process actions that fail to achieve their intended outcome, and (2) how infants respond to events in which their initial predictions are not confirmed. Using eye tracking, 8‐month‐olds, 10‐month‐olds, and adults watched an actor repeatedly reach over a barrier to successfully or unsuccessfully retrieve a ball. Results provide support for a flexible, prospective social information processing ability that emerges during the first year.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102162/1/desc12095.pd

A multimodal corpus of speech to infant and adult listeners

An audio and video corpus of speech addressed to 28 11-month-olds is described. The corpus allows comparisons between adult speech directed towards infants, familiar adults and unfamiliar adult addressees, as well as of caregivers’ word teaching strategies across word classes. Summary data show that infant-directed speech differed more from speech to unfamiliar than familiar adults; that word teaching strategies for nominals versus verbs and adjectives differed; that mothers mostly addressed infants with multi-word utterances; and that infants’ vocabulary size was unrelated to speech rate, but correlated positively with predominance of continuous caregiver speech (not of isolated words) in the input

Developmental changes in the balance of disparity, blur and looming/proximity cues to drive ocular alignment and focus

Accurate co-ordination of accommodation and convergence is necessary to view near objects and develop fine motor co-ordination. We used a remote haploscopic videorefraction paradigm to measure longitudinal changes in simultaneous ocular accommodation and vergence to targets at different depths, and to all combinations of blur, binocular disparity, and change-in-size (“proximity”) cues. Infants were followed longitudinally and compared to older children and young adults, with the prediction that sensitivity to different cues would change during development. Mean infant responses to the most naturalistic condition were similar to those of adults from 6-7 weeks (accommodation) and 8-9 weeks (vergence). Proximity cues influenced responses most in infants less than 14 weeks of age, but sensitivity declined thereafter. Between 12-28 weeks of age infants were equally responsive to all three cues, while in older children and adults manipulation of disparity resulted in the greatest changes in response. Despite rapid development of visual acuity (thus increasing availability of blur cues), responses to blur were stable throughout development. Our results suggest that during much of infancy, vergence and accommodation responses are not dependent on the development of specific depth cues, but make use of any cues available to drive appropriate changes in response

Implicit and explicit body representations

Several forms of perception require that sensory information be referenced to representations of the size and shape of the body. This requirement is especially acute in somatosensation in which the main receptor surface (i.e., the skin) is itself coextensive with the body. In this paper I will review recent research investigating the body representations underlying somatosensory information processing, including abilities such as tactile localisation, tactile size perception, and position sense. These representations show remarkably large and stereotyped distortions of represented body size and shape. Intriguingly, these distortions appear to mirror distortions characteristic of somatosensory maps, though in attenuated form. In contrast, when asked to make overt judgments about perceived body form, participants are generally quite accurate. This pattern of results suggests that higher-level somatosensory processing relies on a class of implicit body representation, distinct from the conscious body image. I discuss the implications of these results for understanding the nature of body representation and the factors which influence it