Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants

@article{citeulike:2537315, abstract = {We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had different preferences for novel sequences involving voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives, suggesting that each group had internalized a different familiarization alternation. In Experiment 2, 8.5-month-olds exhibited the same patterns of preference. In Experiments 3 and 4, we investigated whether infants' preferences were driven solely by preferences for sequences of high transitional probability. Although 8.5-month-olds in Experiment 3 were sensitive to the relative probabilities of sequences in the familiarization stimuli, only 12-month-olds in Experiment 4 showed evidence of having grouped alternating segments into a single functional category. Taken together, these results suggest a developmental trajectory for the acquisition of phonological alternations using distributional cues in the input.}, author = {White, Katherine S. and Peperkamp, Sharon and Kirk, Cecilia and Morgan, James L. }, citeulike-article-id = {2537315}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.012}, journal = {Cognition}, keywords = {speech-perception, statistical-learning}, month = {April}, number = {1}, pages = {238--265}, posted-at = {2008-03-15 16:43:03}, priority = {2}, title = {Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.012}, volume = {107}, year = {2008} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2537315 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2537315 TI - Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants JF - Cognition VL - 107 IS - 1 SP - 238 EP - 265 N2 - We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had different preferences for novel sequences involving voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives, suggesting that each group had internalized a different familiarization alternation. In Experiment 2, 8.5-month-olds exhibited the same patterns of preference. In Experiments 3 and 4, we investigated whether infants' preferences were driven solely by preferences for sequences of high transitional probability. Although 8.5-month-olds in Experiment 3 were sensitive to the relative probabilities of sequences in the familiarization stimuli, only 12-month-olds in Experiment 4 showed evidence of having grouped alternating segments into a single functional category. Taken together, these results suggest a developmental trajectory for the acquisition of phonological alternations using distributional cues in the input. KW - speech-perception KW - statistical-learning AU - White, Katherine AU - Peperkamp, Sharon AU - Kirk, Cecilia AU - Morgan, James PY - 2008/04// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.012 ER -