Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?

Karaman F., Lany J., Hay J. F.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE, cilt.48, sa.3, 2024 (SSCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 48 Sayı: 3
  • Basım Tarihi: 2024
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1111/cogs.13433
  • Dergi Adı: COGNITIVE SCIENCE
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Periodicals Index Online, Applied Science & Technology Source, Business Source Elite, Business Source Premier, Communication Abstracts, Computer & Applied Sciences, EBSCO Education Source, Educational research abstracts (ERA), EMBASE, ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo
  • Uşak Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

AbstractInfants are sensitive to statistics in spoken language that aid word‐form segmentation and immediate mapping to referents. However, it is not clear whether this sensitivity influences the formation and retention of word‐referent mappings across a delay, two real‐world challenges that learners must overcome. We tested how the timing of referent training, relative to familiarization with transitional probabilities (TPs) in speech, impacts English‐learning 23‐month‐olds’ ability to form and retain word‐referent mappings. In Experiment 1, we tested infants’ ability to retain TP information across a 10‐min delay and use it in the service of word learning. Infants successfully mapped high‐TP but not low‐TP words to referents. In Experiment 2, infants readily mapped the same words even when they were unfamiliar. In Experiment 3, high‐ and low‐TP word‐referent mappings were trained immediately after familiarization, and infants readily remembered these associations 10 min later. In sum, although 23‐month‐old infants do not need strong statistics to map word forms to referents immediately, or to remember those mappings across a delay, infants are nevertheless sensitive to these statistics in the speech stream, and they influence mapping after a delay. These findings suggest that, by 23 months of age, sensitivity to statistics in speech may impact infants’ language development by leading word forms with low coherence to be poorly mapped following even a short period of consolidation.