Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning Export

@article{citeulike:3879863, abstract = {Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still-developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them.}, address = {Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, USA}, author = {Rost, Gwyneth C. and McMurray, Bob}, citeulike-article-id = {3879863}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/121634840/ABSTRACT}, doi = {10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x}, issn = {1467-7687}, journal = {Developmental Science}, keywords = {infants, language, learning, speaker\_variability, speech\_perception, variability, word\_learning}, number = {2}, pages = {339--349}, posted-at = {2009-06-30 20:44:23}, priority = {2}, title = {Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x}, volume = {12}, year = {2009} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:3879863 L3 - citeulike-article-id:3879863 N2 - Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still-developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them. IS - 2 JF - Developmental Science SN - 1467-7687 AD - Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, USA EP - 349 TI - Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning VL - 12 SP - 339 KW - infants KW - language KW - learning KW - speaker_variability KW - speech_perception KW - variability KW - word_learning AU - Rost, Gwyneth AU - McMurray, Bob PY - 2009/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x ER -