Distributional Learning in Vowel Distinctions by 8-month-old English Infants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Distributional Learning in Vowel Distinctions by 8-month-old English Infants Ferran Pons (fpons@psych.ubc.ca) Infant Studies Centre, University of British Columbia. 2 136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 CANADA Laura Sabourin (sabourin@uoregon.edu) Brain Development Lab, University of Oregon. 12 2 7 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 USA Jasmine C. Cady (jwlabmgr@psych.ubc.ca) Infant Studies Centre, University of British Columbia. 2 136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 CANADA Janet F. Werker (jwerker@psych.ubc.ca) Infant Studies Centre, University of British Columbia. 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 CANADA interaction between conditions, demonstrating that the type of distribution did not affect performance. Introduction By the end of the first year of life, infants show decreased sensitivity to phonetic differences not used in their native language (Werker & Tees, 1984) and increased sensitivity to native distinctions (Kuhl et al., 2006). With an artificial language learning manipulation, Maye, Werker, and Gerken (2002) demonstrated that infants’ speech sound categories change as a function of the distributional properties of the input. Recently, Bosch and Sebastian-Galles (2003) reported a different pattern of perceptual reorganization for Catalan- Spanish bilingual infants: At 4 and 12 months, but not at 8 months of age, infants were able to discriminate the Catalan vowel contrast / E -e/. This finding challenges the idea that linguistic exposure promotes increased sensitivity within the language environment. It was suggested that distributional learning may be the mechanism responsible for such a pattern. Finally, Sabourin and Werker (in prep.) found that 8-month-old English infants had difficulties discriminating two vowels (/ I /-/e/) that are close in vowel space. The present study investigates the role of distributional learning in these similar vowels (/ I /-/e/). Discussion These results suggest that there may be limitations to distributional learning, and support the idea that vowel perception may develop in a different manner than consonants. The type of familiarization used (as in Maye et al., 2002) may not be powerful enough to impact vowel perception. The critical phonetic cues distinguishing vowel contrasts may be more salient than those distinguishing consonant contrasts. Simple exposure to the reduced set of stimuli used in this study in comparison to those used in Sabourin and Werker, may have been enough to highlight that salient distinction, irrespective of the distributional manipulation. Our results are in accordance with PRIMIR (Werker & Curtin, 2005) which predicts that salient contrasts will be resistant to distributional learning. Future experiments are needed to further explore the present results and to investigate other possible explanations, such as prototypically preferences. Method References Bosch, L. & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2003). Simultaneous bilingualism and the perception of a language-specific vowel contrast in the first year of life. Language and Speech, 46 (3), 183-216. Kuhl, P.K., Stevens, E., Hayashi, A., Deguchi, T., Kiritani, S. & Iverson, P. (2006). Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months. Developmental Science, 9 (2), F1-F9. Maye, J., Werker J.F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82, B101-B111. Werker, J.F. & Curtin, S. (2005). PRIMIR: a developmental model of speech processing. Language Learning and Development, 1, 197–234. Werker, J.F. & Tees, R.C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 32 eight-month-old Canadian-English infants (15 females) were familiarized in a unimodal or bimodal manner to an 8- step continuum from / I / to /e/ vowels embedded in a nonsense word ([t I b]-[teb]). Tokens were a subset of the stimuli used by Sabourin and Werker (in prep.). Familiarization was followed by a test phase where two types of test trials were presented: Non-alternating, where either stimulus 3 or stimulus 6 was repeated, and alternating, where infants heard the alternation of the two endpoint stimuli of the continuum (tokens 1 and 8). Results Infants in both conditions (unimodal and bimodal) were able to discriminate between the endpoint tokens of the continuum. They listened longer to the alternating than to the non-alternating trials (p < .001). There was no
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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