TY - JOUR
T1 - Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience
AU - Chambers, Kyle E.
AU - Onishi, Kristine H.
AU - Fisher, Cynthia
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by grants from NIH (1 R55 HD/OD34715-01), NSF (SBR 98-73450), and the UIUC Research Board to Cynthia Fisher, NIMH (MH41704) to Gregory L. Murphy, and an NIMH training grant (1 T32MH19990-01). We thank the undergraduate assistants in the Language Acquisition Lab for help in testing infants. We also thank Renée Baillargeon, Aaron Benjamin, Gary Dell, Lisa Octigan, Hyun-joo Song, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
PY - 2003/3
Y1 - 2003/3
N2 - Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-old infants from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position (e.g. /bæp/ not /pæb/). In a later head-turn preference test, infants listened longer to new syllables that violated the experimental phonotactic constraints than to new syllables that honored them. Thus, infants rapidly learned phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience and extended them to unstudied syllables, documenting the sensitivity of the infant's language processing system to abstractions over linguistic experience.
AB - Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-old infants from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position (e.g. /bæp/ not /pæb/). In a later head-turn preference test, infants listened longer to new syllables that violated the experimental phonotactic constraints than to new syllables that honored them. Thus, infants rapidly learned phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience and extended them to unstudied syllables, documenting the sensitivity of the infant's language processing system to abstractions over linguistic experience.
KW - Infants
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Phonotactic learning
KW - Speech perception
KW - Statistical learning
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U2 - 10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00233-0
DO - 10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00233-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 12590043
AN - SCOPUS:0037362515
VL - 87
SP - B69-B77
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
IS - 2
ER -