VIOLA · Variability's Influence on Language Acquisition

Variability's Influence on Language Acquisition

Some babies spend most of their waking time with only one person; others hear speech from many different speakers. Even if the two babies heard the very same words, their experiences would not be equivalent. In fact, although for us adults “dog” said by a girl and “dog” said by a grandfather mean the same, careful analysis reveals that words sound very different depending on who speaks them. So are there effects on how babies learn language depending on how many people speak to them? When we started this project, the answer was far from obvious. Many previous researchers had tried to look at this question by doing laboratory experiments. For instance, one experimenter played a recording with many repetitions of a made-up word spoken alone (“beece, beece, beece”) and then passages using the word or not, to test for simple recognition. Another taught babies two made-up similar words (a “beece” was a round yellow toy, and a “peece” was a square red one) using only one speaker’s voice or several speakers’ voices. It turns out that results from these studies were really variable, with babies hearing many different voices performing better or worse than babies hearing one or a few voices. Results probably differed because the methods varied -- but what we realized is that a real baby, in the real world, needs to do all of these things: recognize words, and learn to map words to objects in the world. It turned out that nobody had thought about our key question: Does number of talkers matter in the real world? We knew this question was difficult to answer, so we used every relevant method to try to answer it, as we explain in the next section.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз