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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.
Statistical learning (and more broadly, distributional learning) can be accepted as a component of language acquisition by researchers on either side of the "nature and nurture" debate. From the perspective of that debate, an important question is whether statistical learning can, by itself, serve as an alternative to nativist explanations for ...
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, Abend et al. built a Bayesian inference model that mimics a child's acquisition of English, using only data from a single child in the CHILDES corpus. They found that the model successfully learned English word order, mappings between word labels and semantic meanings of words (i.e. word learning), and used surrounding syntax to ...
While grammatical and syntactic learning can be seen as a part of language acquisition, speech acquisition includes the development of speech perception and speech production over the first years of a child's lifetime. There are several models to explain the norms of speech sound or phoneme acquisition in children.
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 ]
A popular example, often quoted in the field, is the phrase "How to wreck a nice beach", which sounds very similar to "How to recognize speech". [4] As this example shows, proper lexical segmentation depends on context and semantics which draws on the whole of human knowledge and experience, and would thus require advanced pattern recognition ...