Perceptual anchoring as a stepping-stone into word learning: A combined brain-behavior approach

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This proposal aims to better understand children´s enormously efficient lexicon acquisition by evaluating perceptual anchoring as a facilitating learning mechanism. Perceptual anchoring is an essential mechanism in human perception that involves learning from repetitive contexts. When listeners process new information, they greatly benefit from repetition in the auditory environment, leading to the formation of internal references, against which new sounds can be classified. I propose perceptual anchoring as a stepping-stone into word learning: Repeated acoustic patterns (i.e., perceptual anchors) drive the establishment of sound-based lexical representations, which may in turn ease the acquisition of new words. Testing this hypothesis, I will first assess perceptual anchoring in the non-linguistic domain at 3-6 months. For the age of 6-14 months, I will then implement anchoring in linguistic processing, testing the learning transfer from the acoustic level into the phonological level, and from the phonological level into the lexical level. For example, in a familiarization-test paradigm, I will present syllables in a reference condition and a no-reference condition during familiarization. Subsequently, I will test recognition of pseudowords that contain the familiarized or novel syllables. If anchoring facilitates the phoneme-to-word transfer, I expect enhanced brain responses for pseudowords with familiarized versus novel syllables (recognition effect), with stronger responses for syllables familiarized under reference conditions (anchor effect). Since behavior is difficult to asses in infants, I will use neuroimaging methods that capture temporal and spatial characteristics of infants´ brain responses of anchoring and recognition. As an external validation, I will longitudinally relate these neural correlates to children´s later vocabulary skills. The current research proposal will illuminate the developmental course of perceptual anchoring as a potential mechanism in word learning and contribute to our understanding of children´s impressive mastery of language acquisition.