Statistical Learning Flashcards
What are infants’ preferences when learning language?
They prefer forward-going speech, their own language, and their mother’s voice.
When do babies start learning language, and what can they differentiate?
They start in the womb, and can discriminate function words from content words on the basis of different acoustic properties. Can also differentiate most sound contrasts.
By 1 years old, infants can….
make contrasts present only in their language. (eg. Hindi babies can differentiate between the 2 ‘d’ sounds, which English speaking babies cannot)
Who was Noam Chomsky and what did he believe in?
He was a nativist who believed language learning is innate, since infants are deprived of language stimuli at birth. Also believed that grammar was universal.
What is the learning theory?
It is when knowledge is gained through reward and punishment. Since parents do not do this with babies, Chomsky believed language learning was innate.
What do learning theorists argue when it comes to learning language?
They believe language is learnt through its predictability and patterns, with general learning mechanisms like statistical learning.
What did Teinonen et al. (2009) discover about sleeping newborns?
The newborns’ brains responded differently to the new words heard whilst awake vs the old words heard whilst asleep, indicating that they use familiarity to group sounds together into words.
What is the theory of mind?
It is the understanding that people have desires, beliefs, and goals.
Baldwin et al. (2001) experiment of showing babies 2 videos of a woman picking up a rug indicates that…
Infants’ statistical learning enables them to pick up patterns in behaviour. They recognised that the video stopped mid-way was unusual.
What is Specific Language Impairment (SLI)?
It is when children use short sentences, have small vocabularies, and have difficulty learning new words.
How is SLI related to statistical learning?
It was found that better statistical learning led to better language ability.
Autism is a neural disorder characterised by qualitative deficits in what?
Social interaction (difficulty understanding others / impaired theory of mind), communication (poor language ability) and imagination.
What is the difference between typically developing children and autistic children when listening to non-random and random syllables?
Certain areas of their brain is activated more when listening to non-random syllables for typically-developing children. However, for autistic children, there is no differentiation.
