How who is talking matters as much as what they say to infant language learners

• Published in: Cognitive psychology Vol. 106; pp. 1 - 20
• Main Authors: Gonzales, Kalim, Gerken, LouAnn, Gómez, Rebecca L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier Inc 01.11.2018
• Subjects: Exemplar models; Female; General auditory account; Humans; Infant; Language acquisition; Language Development; Learning; Linguistics; Male; Paralinguistic variation; Sociolinguistic variation; Speech; Speech Perception; Voice perception; Voice Quality; General auditory account; Paralinguistic variation; Language acquisition; Exemplar models; Sociolinguistic variation; Voice perception
• ISSN: 0010-0285; 1095-5623
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2018.04.003

[Display omitted] •Infants learn language from a speech signal that varies widely across talkers due to differences both in (1) voice characteristics and in (2) language usage.•How infants negotiate these two types of inter-talker differences has largely been considered separately despite frequent co-variation between the two: Due to everyday sociolinguistic factors, one talker often differs reliably from another not only in voice characteristics but also in language usage.•We find that 12-month-old infants use inter-talker voice variation as a perceptual cue for learning abstract grammar rules to which only one talker adheres.•Voice characteristics may figure more broadly in language learning than suggested by previous developmental research, which has focused on infants’ ability to ignore this paralinguistic information, in order to detect talkers’ shared linguistic conventions. Human vocalizations contain both voice characteristics that convey who is talking and sophisticated linguistic structure. Inter-talker variation in voice characteristics is traditionally seen as posing a challenge for infant language learners, who must disregard this variation when the task is to detect talkers’ shared linguistic conventions. However, talkers often differ markedly in their pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. This is true even in monolingual environments, given factors like gender, dialect, and proficiency. We therefore asked whether infants treat the voice characteristics distinguishing talkers as a cue for learning linguistic conventions that one talker may follow more closely than another. Supporting this previously untested hypothesis, 12-month-olds did not freely combine two talkers’ sentences distinguished by voice to more robustly learn the talkers’ shared grammar rules. Rather, they used this voice information to learn rules to which only one talker adhered, a finding replicated in same-aged infants with greater second language exposure. Both language groups generalized the rules to novel sentences produced by a novel talker. Voice characteristics can thus help infants learn and generalize talker-dependent linguistic structure, which pervades natural language. Results are interpreted in light of theories linking language learning with voice perception.