Cross-Situational Statistical Learning of Phonologically Overlapping Words

Cross-Situational Statistical Learning of Phonologically Overlapping Words Paola Escudero (paola.escudero@uws.edu.au) MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2751, Australia Karen Mulak (k.mulak@uws.edu.au) MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2751, Australia Haley Vlach (hvlach@wisc.edu) Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 1025 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA ambiguity in word-referent pairings across moments in time. This phenomenon is most commonly termed cross- situational or statistical word learning (e.g., Fazly, Alishahi, & Stevenson, 2010; Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Smith & Yu, 2008; Vlach & Sandhofer, 2011; Yu & Smith, 2007, 2011). In a typical experiment, learners are presented with a series of ambiguous learning events, which include multiple words and multiple objects. After a series of learning events, adult participants are presented with a forced-choice test in which they are asked to infer object-label pairings, while infants are presented with a preferential-looking task. This body of work has revealed that infants (e.g., 12- and 14- month-olds; Smith & Yu, 2008) and adults (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2007) are able to learn word mappings by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across learning events. Cross-situational statistical learning research has focused on questions examining learners’ ability to determine word- referent pairings. However, in real-world language learning environments, learners are faced with the challenge of determining word-referent pairings while simultaneously engaging in other cognitive processes that support language learning. For example, learners must simultaneously determine word-referent pairings while parsing words that overlap phonologically. To date, experiments have primarily used words that contain gross phonological differences, that is, words that differ in multiple sound segments, such as “beat” and “rule”. However, many words, especially in English, contain the same sounds with the exception of one segment, either a vowel or a consonant. In other words, they form phonologically minimal pairs such us “beat”-“bit” or “bet”- “debt”. Consequently, it is unknown whether learners are able to simultaneously learn cross-situational statistics while distinguishing phonologically minimal pairs. Adults have difficulty in learning phonologically minimal pairs. For example, Dutch and Spanish listeners were presented with a word learning task in which they were explicitly taught twelve pseudo-words together with their corresponding visual referents (Escudero, Broersma, & Simon, 2012). The words followed Dutch phonotactic Abstract Recent research has sought to examine how learners are able to track the co-occurrence of words and objects across moments in time, a behavior commonly termed cross- situational statistical learning. The current experiment was designed to examine if learners can simultaneously determine word-referent pairings while engaging in other cognitive processes that support language learning, such as distinguishing phonologically overlapping words. Participants were presented with a cross-situational statistical learning task with pairs of words in four categories: non-minimal pairs, near minimal pairs, vowel minimal pairs, and consonant minimal pairs. The results revealed that participants were able to simultaneously learn word-referent pairings while distinguishing all four categories of word pairings. However, learners experienced the most difficulty learning vowel minimal pairs. This work demonstrates that learners are able to simultaneously engage in multiple cognitive processes that support language learning. Keywords: cross-situational statistical learning; statistical learning; word learning; phonologically minimal pairs; bilingualism Introduction In one moment in time, the world presents learners with a seemingly infinite amount of information. Across several fields of study, including cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, computer science, and linguistics, a large research pursuit has been to characterize how it is that learners acquire, store, and later retrieve such a large data set of information. Indeed, this task has historically been characterized as theoretically impossible (e.g., Quine, 1960), but yet learners appear to acquire a great deal of information with ease. A more recent trend in research has been to examine how it is that learners acquire, store, and later retrieve information across several moments in time. For example, in the domain of language learning and development, research has sought to determine how learners resolve