Mark my words: High frequency marker words impact early stages of language learning.

ABSTRACT: High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support categorization when words are being segmented for the first time. We familiarized learners with continuous artificial speech comprising repetitions of target words, which were preceded by high-frequency marker words. Crucially, marker words distinguished targets into 2 distributionally defined categories. We measured learning with segmentation and categorization tests and compared performance against a control group that heard the artificial speech without

SUBMITTER: Frost RLA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6746567 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature