Statistical learning of multiple patterns in infants, adults, and monkeys

婴儿、成人和猴子多种模式的统计学习

• 批准号: 8116119
• 负责人: DANIEL J WEISS
• 金额: $ 22.16万
• 依托单位: PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, THE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-04-01 至 2016-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8116119
• 关键词: Adult; American; Applications Grants; Benchmarking; British; Cues; Data; Development; Disease; Economics; Elements; Environment; Experimental Designs; Exposure to; Eye; Goals; Head; Head Movements; Hour; Human; Human Development; Infant; Judgment; Language; Language Delays; Language Development; Language Disorders; Lead; Learning; Linguistics; Location; Machine Learning; Measures; Methods; Monkeys; Parents; Pattern; Performance; Phonetics; Procedures; Recovery; Research; Rivers; Role; Saguinus; Semantics; Signal Transduction; Speech; Stimulus; Stream; Structure; Sum; System; Testing; Time; Variant; Voice; Work; auditory stimulus; bilingualism; design; lexical; man; nonhuman primate; novel; phonology; preference; research study; response; theories

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of the present grant application is to understand how a naive learner collects distributional information from the environment and makes an implicit decision that the corpus of input contains either a single structure or multiple structures. Mature learners are incredibly facile at interpreting information in a context-specific manner, thereby partitioning the input into two or more sub-structures. We will investigate this question of context-specific statistical learning by studying two types of naove learners - human infants and tamarin monkeys - as well as mature adults. The specific objective of the proposed research is to determine whether and how infants learn that there are multiple patterns of information embedded in streams of speech, or that there are multiple words that refer to the same object, and to determine whether context-specific statistical learning has species-specific biases. Two types of experimental designs will be used to study context-specific statistical learning. The first uses a single change in the underlying structure. A variety of contextual cues will be introduced to signal that the underlying structure has undergone a change, and the dependent measure is whether the learner has acquired the first, the second, both the first and the second, or neither structures. The second design uses two alternating structures that are signaled by a variety of stimulus cues to partition the two underlying structures. It is important to note that in both of these designs, if the learner aggregates the structural information across the entire corpus, rather than partitioning the corpus into two subsets, no learning is possible. Thus, these designs test the ability of the learner to extract the contextual cues that partition the input into subsets. The implications of the proposed studies are fundamental to any theory of learning, but particularly to the kind of implicit (passive exposure) statistical learning that is thought to characterize much of early human development in many domains. Infants must learn - by a combination of sensitivity to distributional patterns and innate biases - that patterns of information are context-specific, as in the case of bilingualism. Our proposed experiments will extend our recent studies of human adults by determining (a) whether infants show the same pattern of learning biases (primacy effects) and context-sensitivity (to talker voice), (b) whether tamarin monkeys show these same biases and context effects, and (c) what the limits of context-specific statistical learning are in human adults and infants in both word segmentation and referential tasks. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Language development is one of the hallmarks of the human species, yet it is difficult to study because of the huge variation in early exposure to different amounts of linguistic input. The use of artificial languages that are acquired in the lab over a few hours provides a window on the mechanisms of language development. We will study language learning in the lab to gain a unique perspective on how the infants and adults learn the patterns of words in streams of speech and contrast this with performance in nonhuman primates. These studies will not only reveal a basic mechanism of language learning, but also establish benchmarks against which language delay can be compared. Moreover, understanding the mechanisms that lead to successful acquisition in normal infants and adults can help to identify loci of language disorders and design methods for remediating disorders.

描述（由申请人提供）：本授予申请的总体目标是了解天真的学习者如何从环境中收集分配信息，并做出一个隐含的决定，即输入语料库包含单个结构或多个结构。成熟的学习者非常容易以特定于上下文的方式解释信息，从而将输入分为两个或多个子结构。我们将通过研究两种类型的NAOVE学习者（人类婴儿和卧罗林猴子）以及成熟的成年人来研究上下文特定统计学习的问题。拟议研究的具体目标是确定婴儿是否学习是否存在多种嵌入在语音流中的信息模式，或者有多个词是指同一对象，并确定特定于上下文特定的统计学学习是否具有特定物种的偏见。两种类型的实验设计将用于研究环境特定的统计学习。第一个使用基础结构的单个更改。将引入各种上下文提示，以表明基础结构已经发生了变化，而依赖度量是学习者是获得了第一个，第二个，第二和第二个结构，还是两个结构。第二个设计使用两个交替结构，这些结构由各种刺激提示发出信号来划分两个基础结构。重要的是要注意，在这两种设计中，如果学习者在整个语料库中汇总了结构信息，而不是将语料库划分为两个子集，则不可能学习。因此，这些设计测试了学习者提取将输入分配给子集的上下文提示的能力。拟议的研究的含义是任何学习理论的基础，尤其是对那种隐式（被动暴露）统计学习的类型，这些学习被认为是许多领域中人类早期发展的大部分时间。婴儿必须学习 - 通过对分布模式和先天偏见的敏感性的结合，即信息模式是特定于上下文的。我们提出的实验将通过确定（a）婴儿是否表现出相同的学习偏见模式（至关重要的效果）和上下文敏感性（对说话者的声音），（b）tamarin猴子是否表现出这些相同的偏见和上下文效果，以及（c）人类的成人和信息的限制在两个文字中的限制和（c），我们提出的实验模式是否表现出相同的偏见和上下文效果，以及（c）人类的成年人和信息分段，是否表现出这些相同的偏见和上下文效果，以及（c） 公共卫生相关性：语言发展是人类物种的标志之一，但是由于早期暴露于不同语言输入的较大差异，很难研究。几个小时内在实验室中获得的人造语言的使用为语言发展机制提供了一个窗口。我们将在实验室中研究语言学习，以对婴儿和成人如何在语音流中学习单词的模式，并与非人类灵长类动物的表现进行对比。这些研究不仅会揭示语言学习的基本机制，而且还建立了可以比较语言延迟的基准。此外，了解导致正常婴儿和成年人成功获得的机制可以帮助识别语言障碍的基因座和用于补救疾病的设计方法。