Psychology Commons^™

Generalizing Across Speaker And Gender During Early Word Learning: Evidence From A Statistical Learning Paradigm, Madison Newsom

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Before children can speak, they can track the likelihood that two syllables co-occur to pull words out of a continuous stream of speech. Previous research with 17-month-olds has suggested that words that have high co-occurrence statistics (i.e., high transitional probability, HTP) make better object labels than words with low transitional probability (LTP). Here we test whether infants can generalize the patterns tracked in a continuous stream of speech to a novel speaker and gender. Infants are familiarized with an Italian corpus produced by a female speaker, that contains both HTP and LTP words. Following familiarization, infants are trained to pair …