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Learning Words - Words and Their Interface to Sound

5 important questions on Learning Words - Words and Their Interface to Sound

For what purpose did Stager and Werker (1997) use the switch task?

Stager and Werker (1997) used the switch task technique to test whether children pay attention to fine details of sound
in learning new object–word mappings

What does the habituation phase look like in the switch task?

Two objects are each paired up with a novel word that is not an actual English word but obeys its phonotactic rules. To learn these associations, babies look at pictures of objects one at a time, accompanied by their associated labels spoken through a loudspeaker over a number of trials during this phase.

What is interesting about babies hearing the difference between /d/ and /b/?

When they are not required to link meanings with sounds they can hear the difference, but they seem to ignore this difference when it comes to linking up sounds with simple pictures.

Babies hear the differences between /b/ and /d/ but ignore those differences when linking sounds to pictures, this can be explained by one idea. What is that idea?

There's a difference between information that babies can pay attention to while processing language in the here and now, and the information they commit to long-term memory in the form of a stable lexical representation by which sound and meaning properties are recorded.

What is the best evidence that explains that the units babies pull out of speech stream are put to good use in the process of attaching meanings to clumps of sounds?

Estes (2007) did a study with 17-month-old babies that first heard a 2.5 minute stream of an artificial language. Her study showed that babies were able to learn the associations between pictures and words, but only for the sound units that represented word units in the artificial language, showing that they were applying the results of their segmentation strategies to the problem of mapping sounds to meaning.