Word Segmentation
In this project we are looking at how infants are able to find words in continuous speech. Words in speech aren’t separated by blank spaces the way words in text are separated by blank spaces. If you think about what it’s like listening to a foreign language, one of the things that you might be able to recall is that it often sounds like people are speaking really really quickly. That is because if you don’t know any words in a language it is difficult to tell where words start and stop. And this is basically the problem that infants face when hearing their own language for the first time.
Most of the words that your child hears aren’t produced in isolation. So for example, your child doesn’t usually hear “doggy, doggy, doggy”, but instead the words that you might want your child to learn are often embedded in sentences like “Where’s the doggy? Do you want to take the doggy to the park?”
From artificial language studies we know that infants are able to pick up on the likelihood that one sound will follow another. So the first syllable of a word tends to be a good predictor of what’s going to come next. Hearing the syllable ba will predict that the syllable by will come next. And between word boundaries there is a lot less predictability. So in a phrase like happy baby, hearing happy does not predict that baby will come next. The current study will investigate infants ability to remember newly learned words in an unfamiliar natural language.
Word Learning
To build a vocabulary, infants must not only extract individual words from their ambient language, but they must link those newly segmented words with meaning. There is ample evidence that the ability to track statistical regularities (e.g., transitional probabilities, TP) in speech may help infants tackle these challenges by providing candidate object labels that are readily available to be linked to meaning (e.g., Graf Estes et al., 2007; Hay et al., 2011).
However, extracting candidate words from speech does not guarantee that the infants will learn the meaning of those words because objects may not be in infants’ immediate environment when the label is spoken. Thus, while figuring out what a recently segmented word refers to in a particular situation is helpful, remembering it for future use may be equally important for successful word learning. In this project, we explore availability of statistically-defined words as object labels following a delay.
Representative Publications
- Karaman, F.,* & Hay, J. F. (2018). The longevity of statistical learning: When infant memory decays, isolated words come to the rescue. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(2), 221.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000448