ERIC Number: EJ972103
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Jul
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Exclusion Constraints Facilitate Statistical Word Learning
Yoshida, Katherine; Rhemtulla, Mijke; Vouloumanos, Athena
Cognitive Science, v36 n5 p933-947 Jul 2012
The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with detailed sensitivity in stochastic learning environments (Vouloumanos, 2008). Here, we replicate this statistical work with nonspeech sounds and compare the results with the previous speech studies to examine whether exclusion constraints contribute equally to the statistical learning of speech-object and nonspeech-object associations. In environments in which performance could benefit from exclusion, we find a learning advantage for speech over nonspeech, revealing an interaction between statistical and exclusion processes in associative word learning.
Descriptors: Evidence, Infants, Reading Difficulties, Cognitive Processes, Language Processing, Word Recognition, Coding, Comparative Analysis, Speech Communication, Adults, Statistical Analysis, Interaction, Early Childhood Education, Adult Education
Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Early Childhood Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A

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