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Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions.

Publication ,  Journal Article
Bulgarelli, F; Bergelson, E
Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology
March 2023

Seminal work by Stager & Werker (1997) finds that 14-month-olds can rapidly learn two word-object pairings if the words are distinct (e.g. "neem" and "lif") but not similar (e.g. the minimal pair "bih" and "dih"). More recently, studies have found that adding talker variability during exposure to new word-object pairs lets 14-month-olds succeed on the more challenging minimal pair task, presumably due to talker variability highlighting the "relevant" consistencies between the similar words (Rost & McMurray, 2009; Galle et al., 2015; Hohle et al., 2020). It remains an open question, however, whether talker variability would be similarly useful for learning new word-object pairings when the words themselves are already distinct, or whether instead this extra variability may extinguish learning due to increased task demands. We find evidence for the latter. Namely, in our sample of 54 English-learning 14-month-olds, training infants on two word-object pairings (e.g. "neem" with a dog toy and "lof" with a kitchen tool) only led them to notice when the words and objects were switched if they were trained with single-speaker identical word tokens. When the training featured talker variability (from one or multiple talkers) infants failed to learn the pairings. We suggest that when talker variability is not necessary to highlight the invariant differences between similar words, it may actually increase task difficulty, making it harder for infants to determine what to attend to in the earliest phases of word learning.

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Published In

Journal of experimental child psychology

DOI

EISSN

1096-0457

ISSN

0022-0965

Publication Date

March 2023

Volume

227

Start / End Page

105575

Related Subject Headings

  • Verbal Learning
  • Speech Perception
  • Noise
  • Learning
  • Humans
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Dogs
  • Animals
  • 5205 Social and personality psychology
  • 5202 Biological psychology
 

Citation

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Bulgarelli, F., & Bergelson, E. (2023). Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 227, 105575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575
Bulgarelli, Federica, and Elika Bergelson. “Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 227 (March 2023): 105575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575.
Bulgarelli, Federica, and Elika Bergelson. “Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 227, Mar. 2023, p. 105575. Epmc, doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575.
Journal cover image

Published In

Journal of experimental child psychology

DOI

EISSN

1096-0457

ISSN

0022-0965

Publication Date

March 2023

Volume

227

Start / End Page

105575

Related Subject Headings

  • Verbal Learning
  • Speech Perception
  • Noise
  • Learning
  • Humans
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Dogs
  • Animals
  • 5205 Social and personality psychology
  • 5202 Biological psychology