Frank,
M. C., Tenebaum, J. M., Gibson, E. (2013). Learning and long-term retention of
large-scale artificial languages. PLoS ONE 8(1): e52500. doi:10.1371/
journal.pone.0052500
Studying the way that a person learns an artificial
language, a made up language never seen before, is a useful tool in helping
researchers understand the important cues to natural language learning. A shortcoming with typical
artificial language learning studies is that the languages have been quite different
from natural languages – usually the number of words in the language is quite
small, and each word occurs equally often. In order to “scale up” the
artificial language used in the current experiment, the researchers adopted an
artificial language with a 1,000-word vocabulary. Word frequency was also
manipulated: Words occurred as few as 10 times, to as many as 8,000 times.
Unique from the typical lab experiment, the participants had the artificial
language downloaded on personal iPods so that their 10 hours of exposure could
occur throughout their everyday activities, like during their daily commute or
exercising. Importantly, the only cue to segment or learn words from the
artificial language was the probability of syllable co-occurrences – syllables
that belonged together within a word were more likely to occur together than
syllables that spanned a word boundary. This cue exists in natural languages,
and may help language learners learn word units over in addition to other cues such
as pauses or stress patterns.
Following
10 hours of listening to the large-scale artificial language, participants were
tested on their ability to identify words from the language immediately after the
10 hours had been completed, 1-2 months after, or 3 years after. Participants
were able to identify words from the language immediately after listening for
10 hours, and scored just as well 1-2 months after, with higher scores for high
than low frequency words. At the end of 3 years, participants still were able
to identify high frequency words from the artificial language. Although they
did not show retention of low frequency words, this is an incredibly impressive
finding as the words from the artificial language were nonsense, meaningless
words. This study demonstrated that language learners could successfully
segment words from an artificial language with a large vocabulary, and that the
retention of newly learned words depended on word frequency. These processes
might support the learning of second languages. For example, you might remember
words from a second language you’ve studied in the past, especially the ones
you heard most often. The results suggest, too, that listening to a new
language for several hours might help you learn something about the words in
that language.
Blogger: Nicolette Noonan, PhD student with Drs. Lisa Archibald and Marc Joanisse, and coordinator of the Canadian SLP blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment