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The role of statistical learning in language acquisition has been particularly well documented in the area of lexical acquisition. [1] One important contribution to infants' understanding of segmenting words from a continuous stream of speech is their ability to recognize statistical regularities of the speech heard in their environments. [1]
Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects (phonological, syntactic, lexical, morphological, semantic) through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input.
Proponents of statistical learning believe that it is the basis for higher level learning, and that humans use the statistical information to create a database which allows them to learn higher-order generalizations and concepts. For a child acquiring language, the challenge is to parse out discrete segments from a continuous speech stream.
For example, if English-learning infants are exposed to a prevoiced /d/ to voiceless unaspirated /t/ continuum (similar to the /d/ - /t/ distinction in Spanish) with the majority of the tokens occurring near the endpoints of the continuum, i.e., showing extreme prevoicing versus long voice onset times (bimodal distribution) they are better at ...
Most studies of human speech acquisition in children have been done in laboratory settings and with sampling rates of only a couple of hours per week. The need for studies in the more natural setting of the child's home, and at a much higher sampling rate approaching the child's total experience, led to the development of this project concept. [3]
The Piotrowski law is a case of the so-called logistic model (cf. logistic equation). It was shown that it covers also language acquisition processes (cf. language acquisition law). Text block law: Linguistic units (e.g. words, letters, syntactic functions and constructions) show a specific frequency distribution in equally large text blocks.
One example is speech practice, a strategy where the participant listens and reproduces the word in order to assist in remembering and decrease the likelihood of forgetting . [19] Bilingualism can increase an individual's cognitive abilities and contribute to their success in fast mapping words, even when they are using a nonnative language.
The results of the research highlight that language acquisition is a process of learning through statistical means. Moreover, it raises the possibility that infants possess experience-dependent mechanisms that allow for word segmentation and acquisition of other aspects of language. [ 40 ]