3-235 - Contending with talker variability across development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Speech signals are replete with complex, competing information. How do learners distinguish between meaningful versus irrelevant variability? One notable challenge is the presence of different speakers. While learners must abstract away from speaker-specific information to uncover the content of language (Houston & Jusczyk, 2000; Schmale et al., 2015), multiple speakers also provide important social information that can help listeners make predictions about upcoming topics (Borovsky & Creel, 2014). Tracking speaker differences could be particularly useful in input containing multiple structures or multiple languages, as speakers could be used to separate different sets of regularities (Barron-Hauwaert, 2004). Here, we unite ideas from cognitive and social psychology to explore how listeners of different ages and language backgrounds attend to speaker variability in their input.
 
The first two talks focus on infants, testing whether they exploit speaker differences to find underlying structure (Talk 1) and whether monolinguals and bilinguals differ in how they capitalize on within-speaker variability (Talk 2). Two final talks offer complementary, developmental perspectives on children’s attention to this feature of environmental variation. Talk 3 investigates how monolingual and bilingual preschoolers’ sensitivity to the language used by individual speakers varies depending on their familiarity with the languages. Talk 4 explores differences in how speaker variability influences children’s and adults’ learning of multiple categories. Together, these presentations provide a nuanced investigation of how young listeners not only overcome the problem of speaker variability, but also balance competing social and perceptual demands to optimize learning across contexts.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chairs

• Federica Bulgarelli, Duke University

• Christine Potter, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Infants' selective use of speaker cues across contexts - Presenting Author: Christine Potter, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• Can within-person production cues facilitate infants’ and adults’ word segmentation of two artificial languages? - Presenting Author: Angeline Sin Mei Tsui, University of Ottawa; Non-Presenting Author: Lucy Erickson, Carnegie Mellon University; Non-Presenting Author: Erik Theissen, Carnegie Mellon University; Non-Presenting Author: Christopher Fennell, University of Ottawa

• Language as a cue for talker identification in 3- to 5-year-old children - Presenting Author: Reina Mizrahi, University of California San Diego; Non-Presenting Author: Sarah Creel, University of California San Diego

• Limited talker variability differentially impacts artificial grammar learning in preschoolers and adults - Presenting Author: Federica Bulgarelli, Duke University; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel J Weiss, Penn State University