The Longevity of Statistical Learning: When Infant Memory Decays, Isolated Words Come to the Rescue
The Longevity of Statistical Learning: When Infant Memory Decays, Isolated Words Come to the Rescue
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DOI：
10.1037/xlm0000448
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发表时间：
2018-02-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Hay, Jessica F.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Karaman, Ferhat;Hay, Jessica F.
过去20年的研究表明，婴儿具有非凡的计算能力，使他们能够在连续的讲话中找到单词。婴儿可以对音节间的过渡概率信息进行编码，从而从人工语言和自然语言中分词。由于先前的研究已经测试了婴儿在熟悉后立即进行的测试，婴儿在立即熟悉环境之外保留顺序统计数据的能力仍然未知。在这里，我们检查婴儿在熟悉意大利语语料库10分钟后对统计定义的单词的记忆。8个月大的英语学习婴儿熟悉包含4个嵌入目标词的意大利语句子，其中2个词具有高内部TP (HTP, TP = 1.0)， 2个词具有低内部TP (LTP, TP = 0.33)，并使用头转向偏好程序测试他们区分HTP和LTP词的能力。当延迟10分钟后进行测试时，婴儿无法区分HTP和LTP单词，这表明即使是短暂的延迟，对统计信息的记忆也可能衰退（实验1）。实验2-4旨在测试孤立单词的经历是否选择性地增强了对统计定义（即HTP）单词的记忆。当8个月大的婴儿在熟悉后立即获得HTP和LTP单词的孤立标记的额外经验时，10分钟后他们在HTP上的时间明显长于LTP测试试验。虽然统计定义的单词的初始表征可能是脆弱的，但我们的研究结果表明，孤立单词的经验可以通过帮助婴儿对具有强和弱共现统计的单词创建更强大的记忆来加强统计学习的输出。
Research over the past 2 decades has demonstrated that infants are equipped with remarkable computational abilities that allow them to find words in continuous speech. Infants can encode information about the transitional probability (TP) between syllables to segment words from artificial and natural languages. As previous research has tested infants immediately after familiarization, infants' ability to retain sequential statistics beyond the immediate familiarization context remains unknown. Here, we examine infants' memory for statistically defined words 10 min after familiarization with an Italian corpus. Eight-month-old English-learning infants were familiarized with Italian sentences that contained 4 embedded target words-2 words had high internal TP (HTP, TP = 1.0) and 2 had low TP (LTP, TP = .33)-and were tested on their ability to discriminate HTP from LTP words using the Headturn Preference Procedure. When tested after a 10-min delay, infants failed to discriminate HTP from LTP words, suggesting that memory for statistical information likely decays over even short delays (Experiment 1). Experiments 2-4 were designed to test whether experience with isolated words selectively reinforces memory for statistically defined (i.e., HTP) words. When 8-month-olds were given additional experience with isolated tokens of both HTP and LTP words immediately after familiarization, they looked significantly longer on HTP than LTP test trials 10 min later. Although initial representations of statistically defined words may be fragile, our results suggest that experience with isolated words may reinforce the output of statistical learning by helping infants create more robust memories for words with strong versus weak co-occurrence statistics.