Infants struggle to apply earlier-demonstrated sound-discrimination abilities to later word-learning, attending to non-constrastive acoustic dimensions (e.g., Hay et al., 2015), and not always to contrastive dimensions (e.g., Stager & Werker, 1997). One hint about the nature of infants' difficulties comes from the observation that input from multiple talkers can improve word learning (Rost & McMurray, 2009). This may be because, when a single talker says both of the to-be-learned words, consistent talker's-voice characteristics make the acoustics of the two words more overlapping (Apfelbaum & McMurray, 2011). Here, we test that notion. We taught 14-month-old infants two similar-sounding words in the Switch habituation paradigm. The same amount of overall talker variability was present as in prior multiple-talker experiments, but male and female talkers said different words, creating a gender-word correlation. Under an-acoustic-similarity account, correlated talker gender should help to separate words-acoustically and facilitate learning. Instead, we found that correlated talker gender impaired learning of word-object pairings compared with uncorrelated talker gender-even when gender-word pairings were always maintained in test-casting doubt on one account of the beneficial effects of talker variability. We discuss several alternate potential explanations for this effect.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/623962 |
| Date | 05 January 2017 |
| Creators | Quam, Carolyn, Knight, Sara, Gerken, LouAnn |
| Contributors | Univ Arizona, Dept Psychol, Univ Arizona, Dept Psychiat |
| Publisher | UBIQUITY PRESS LTD |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
| Rights | © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). |
| Relation | http://www.journal-labphon.org/articles/10.5334/labphon.25/ |
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