Purpose: Previous studies have reported the success of distributional learning for adult speakers across segmental and suprasegmental categories immediately after training. On the other hand, second language (L2) perception models posit that the ease with which learners perceive a nonnative speech contrast depends on the perceptual mapping between…

This study aimed to determine how Chinese children adapt to Chinese orthography-phonology correspondence by acquiring phonetic radical awareness (PRA). This study used two important Chinese encoding approaches (rote and orthographic approaches) as the developmental trajectory, in which the present study hypothesized that phonological awareness…

Learning to read and spell involves learning about the written forms of words and how these are linked to language. Writing systems include formal patterns, which pertain to the appearance of written words, and functional patterns, which pertain to links between units of writing and units of language. We review the evidence that learners of a…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

The purpose of this study was to investigate sub-lexical segmentation in Spanish-speaking children based on the perception of regular syllables (pseudomorphemes), as well as their association with a visual referent. Both of these skills are the precursors to learning morphology for language acquisition. Twenty-three 12-month-old children…

Games are highly appreciated by the population, so due to the COVID-19 pandemic confinement we decided to carry out an Internet research of several games, in order to use them for the assimilation of new words of Biochemical students. Games found in puzzle books allow the stimulation of memory, reasoning and other brain capacities, such as keeping…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this research note is to provide a performance comparison of available algorithms for the automated evaluation of oral diadochokinesis using speech samples from patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: Four different algorithms based on a wide range of signal processing approaches were tested on a…

Every language has unique phonotactics, general rules about how phonemes combine to make syllables. We know that people can implicitly learn new phonotactic rules in the laboratory, and these rules then affect their speech errors. Some types of rules, however, require a consolidation period before they influence speech errors. Two experiments are…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /t/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g. ABA) enhanced 5-month-olds' capacity to acquire a rule that infants failed to learn when the rule was presented with visual presentation of…