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Previous empirical studies have provided evidence that phonology (i.e., the sounds of words) is not the only cue that facilitates spelling development. Other cues such as morphology (i.e., the formation of words from meaningful parts) and graphotactics (i.e., spelling rules which dictate constraints on the order and arrangement of letters in words) can also be important information to children and adults to learn the written form of a language. Furthermore, existing evidence has also demonstrated that participants’ explicit awareness of patterns in inputs significantly impacts their learning. Given the limited number of experimental studies, our study investigates the importance learners place on different factors such as graphotactic and semantic cues when learning writing systems and how explicit awareness of certain patterns impacts their performance. We also ask how individual differences may account for their performance. Participants will engage in an online alien language learning paradigm followed by a series of tasks testing their knowledge of novel words learned in the paradigm and English real words. Learning will be assessed through comparing participants’ performance to chance level in the alternative-forced choice task.

Acquiring non-native speech contrasts can be difficult. A seminal study by Logan, Lively and Pisoni (1991) established the effectiveness of phonetic training for improving non-native speech perception: Japanese learners of English were trained to perceive /r/-/l/ using minimal pairs over 15 training sessions. A pre/post-test design established learning and generalisation. In a follow up study, Lively, Logan and Pisoni (1993) presented further evidence which suggested that talker variability in training stimuli was crucial in leading to greater generalisation. These findings have been very influential and “high variability phonetic training” is now a standard methodology in the field. However, while the general benefit of phonetic training is well replicated, the evidence for an advantage of high over lower variability training remains mixed. We propose a large-scale replication of the original studies using updated statistical analyses to confirm whether learners generalise more after phonetic training using multiple talkers over a single talker.

We plan an experiment that will test whether iconic prosody facilitates word learning in children aged 30-54 months. We teach children novel words to describe events with either iconic or neutral child-directed prosody in two learning contexts: a concurrent learning context, where exposure to the label co-occurs with the event, and a displaced context, where label exposure occurs after the event has been shown.

We plan an experiment that will test whether iconic gestures facilitate word learning in children aged 30-54 months. We teach children novel words to describe events, accompanied by either iconic or interactive gestures in two learning contexts: a concurrent learning context, where exposure to the label + gesture co-occurs with the event, and a displaced context, where label + gesture exposure occurs after the event has been shown.

Stage 1 IPA at PCI RR

Statistical learning processes-akin to those seen in spoken language acquisition (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996)-may be important for the development of literacy, particularly spelling development. One previous study provides direct evidence for this process: Samara and Caravolas (2014) demonstrated that 7-year-olds generalize over permissible letter contexts (graphotactics) in novel word-like stimuli under incidental learning conditions. However, unlike in actual orthography, conditioning contexts in Samara and Caravolas' (2014) stimuli comprised perfectly correlated, redundant cues in both word-initial and word-final positions. The current study explores whether 7-year-olds can extract such constraints in the absence of redundant cues. Since theories of literacy development predict greater sensitivity to restrictions within word-final units, we also contrast learning in word-initial and word-final units. We demonstrate that-for 7-year-old learners in two linguistic contexts (English and Turkish)-there is substantial evidence for the learning of both types of restriction.

Many languages contain phonological and/or semantic cues to word class membership. Previous research suggests that when these two cues are both present in the input, learners often favour phonological cues. In the current study we ask whether child and adult learners can use semantic cues to form novel word classes, and whether they can generalize these classes to novel words from the same semantic class. In addition, we examined whether the number of nouns exemplifying each semantic class (type-frequency) determined the extent of the generalization. To do this, we taught children (6 year olds) and adults a semi-artificial language in which English nouns were followed by novel particles. Particle use was either fully or partially determined by the semantics (animal vs. vehicle) of the noun (with an additional control condition in which particle use was unconditioned by semantic cues). Crucially there were no phonological cues to word class membership. Production and forced choice tests showed that both child and adult learners were able to form word categories, and generalize these to novel nouns, when the semantic cues in the input were fully consistent. Adults (but not children), also generalized semantic cues to novel nouns based on partially consistent semantic cues. However, in almost all cases, successful generalization of the semantic categories to novel items was dependent upon explicit awareness of the semantic cues in the learning input. There was no evidence for a role of type-frequency in generalization.

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity. Our study investigated this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on second language vocabulary learning in different age groups. Previous literature suggests that speaker variability benefits adult second language vocabulary learning (e.g., Barcroft & Sommers, 2005): Is this true for younger learners? Native English speaking adults, 7-8 year olds, and 10-11 year olds, learned six novel Lithuanian words from a single speaker, and six from eight speakers. As predicted, adults showed better production of the multi-speaker items at test. No such benefit was found for either group of children (Bayes Factor analyses provide substantial evidence for the null). Younger learners also had greater difficulties in processing multiple-speaker cues during training. We conclude that age-related capacity limitations may constrain the ability to utilize speaker variability when learning words in a new language.