Learning Sound Patterns - Infant Statisticians

7 important questions on Learning Sound Patterns - Infant Statisticians

What do they mean with an artificial language?

Language that is constructed to have certain specific properties for the purpose of testing an experimental hypothesis: strings of wounds correspond to "words", which has a meaning or not, and whose combination is or is not contained by syntactic rules. (e.g. Bidaku might form a word)

What did the study of Saffraan et al. do with babies and artificial language?

They played a 2-minute-long continuous stream of speech to babies.

In the familiarization phase of Saffraan et. al, how many times and how long did the babies hear each word?

Babies hear each "word" 45 times randomly, in an unbroken 2-minute synthesized speech stream
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What did the test phase look like of Saffraan et al?

The loudspeakers presented either a "real" word or a sequence of syllables with parts of two words

According to Saffran, babies are acting like mini statisticians - because they analyze the speech stream. But of what else do they keep track of?

Transitional probabilities (TP's) between syllables. This refers to the likelihood that one particular syllable will be followed by another specific syllable

So how do babies make sense of streams of sounds?

1. Patterns of sounds
2. Listening/ absorbing sound structure
3. Break full sentences into individual words
4. Use those few words to build up a small collection of known word units
5. Relying on familiar words
6. Statistical regularities
→ Categorization
→ Pattern recognition

Why did Teinonen (2009) checked the ERP's of babies during their active sleep?

The ERP's are then less widly variable, the active sleep was 40-80% of the hour-long experiment

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