Lexical and statistical evidence in the acquisition of second language phonemes
By Rachel Hayes-Harb. 2007
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Adults can often improve their perception of novel phoneme contrasts with exposure to a second language, but there is yet little understanding of how they accomplish this. The primary aim of this study was to compare two types of evidence that learners might use to learn the phonemes of second language: minimal pairs, or the lexicon, and statistical information. It was found that adults show evidence of perceptual learning based on statistical information alone, but that the availability of minimal pairs leads to more accurate perception of a novel contrast. In a follow-up experiment, it was found that adults can exhibit knowledge of a novel contrast without yet being able to use the contrast to distinguish words in a lexical task.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44d024143e18079fe8f0f4c38252359e8381a7cd
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Janet F. Werker
- H. H. Yeung
- David J. Lewkowicz
- Patricia K. Kuhl
- Takao K. Hensch
- Kai Olav Ellefsen
- Ferran Pons
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Janet F. Werker
- H. H. Yeung
- David J. Lewkowicz
- Ferran Pons
- Patricia K. Kuhl
- Takao K. Hensch
- Kai Olav Ellefsen
Citations in the corpus
- Perceptual beginnings to language acquisition (2018, background): “By 18 months of age (Maye, personal communication) and in adulthood (Hayes-Harb, 2007; Maye & Gerken, 2001), while distributional learning can modify perceptual discrimination, listeners still fail overall to use these cues to discriminate nonnative phonetic distinctions.”
- Learning words' sounds before learning how words sound: 9-month-olds use distinct objects as cues to categorize speech information. (2009, background): “Furthermore, Hayes-Harb (2007) found that adults showed improved learning when statistical information from frequency-distributions correlated with category labeling cues, over situations when these cues were in conflict.”