1-074 - Exploring novel regularities and challenging situations for statistical learning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Statistical regularities abound in language, and the structure created by these regularities may scaffold language acquisition. Past work with young children supports this notion, demonstrating that infants and toddlers can rapidly acquire the statistical properties of speech at the level of sounds (e.g., Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002), words (e.g., Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996; Smith & Yu, 2008), and syntax (e.g., Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, 2005). Although this research has revealed children’s robust statistical learning abilities, current work continues to investigate the types of regularities inherent to child-directed speech, and to assess how and when learners acquire these properties of language. This symposium will provide new insight on the scope of regularities present in speech, and address real-world constraints on learners’ abilities to harness linguistic patterns. Together these perspectives provide a nuanced view of the strengths and limitations of statistical learning for language acquisition. The first two talks will discuss previously unexplored regularities present in parental speech, examining how caregivers of infants and toddlers adjust properties of their speech to support language acquisition. The final two talks will address whether challenging aspects of natural language environments affect how young learners use statistics to acquire words, and whether other cognitive systems are implicated. Together, these talks inform our understanding of the breadth of regularities present in speech, and the environmental and cognitive constraints on children’s abilities to use them.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chairs

• Dylan Antovich, University of California, Davis

• Katharine Graf Estes, University of California, Davis

Individual Presentations

• Timbre code-switching: How mothers alter their unique vocal statistics to communicate with their children - Presenting Author: Elise A. Piazza, Princeton University; Marius Catalin Iordan, Princeton University; Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• The burstiness of parents’ utterances: Classification of vocal temporal structure during parent-child naturalistic interaction - Presenting Author: Lauren Krogh Slone, Indiana Universtiy, Bloomington; Drew Hamilton Abney, Indiana University; Linda Smith, Indiana University; Chen Yu, Indiana University

• Remember daxes and feps? A protracted course of development for the retention and retrieval of cross-situational statistics - Presenting Author: Haley Vlach, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Catherine DeBrock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Learning to learn: Bilingual experience supports statistical word segmentation in two languages - Presenting Author: Dylan Antovich, University of California, Davis; Katharine Graf Estes, University of California, Davis