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LouAnn Gerken

Publications and source records attributed to LouAnn Gerken.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Decisions, decisions: infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible.

Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how learners might go about solving the induction problem for human language.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2005

Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories.

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, American children aged 1;5 were briefly familiarized with a partial Russian gender paradigm, with a subset of the paradigm members withheld. During test, infants listened on alternate trials to previously withheld grammatical items and ungrammatical items with incorrect gender markings on previously heard stems. Across three experiments, infants discriminated new grammatical from ungrammatical items, but like adults in previous studies, were only able to do so when a subset of familiarization items was double marked for gender category. The results suggest that learners can use distributional cues to category structure, to the exclusion of referential cues, from relatively early in the language learning process.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Nine-month-olds extract structural principles required for natural language.

Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3- and 5-syllable words from one of the two artificial languages that employed the same stress assignment constraints found in natural languages. Infants were able to generalize beyond the stress patterns encountered during familiarization to new patterns reflecting the same constraints. The results suggest that infants are able to rapidly extract the types of structural information required for human language.

Female↗
PubMed2004

Do children's omissions leave traces?

When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on outputs. Under such accounts, it has been largely assumed that these syllables are simply missing, or deleted, from children's outputs. The present research consists of a pair of experiments that tested this assumption by investigating the acoustic properties of utterances manifesting or lacking weak initial syllable omissions. In the two experiments, 33 two-year-old children were asked to imitate sentences like 'He kissed Lucinda' (often reduced as expected to a disyllabic trochaic form, e.g. 'He kissed _cinda') and 'He kissed Cindy'. Durations of each child's imitations were measured from the onset of the verb to the onset of the name, for each pair of sentences containing the reduced or unreduced disyllabic forms, for example, 'kissed cinda' vs. 'kissed Cindy'. Our results yielded a significantly longer duration for the verb-onset to name-onset portion of sentences containing reduced '_cinda'-type names than for sentences with 'Cindy'-type names. This finding provides evidence that children do not completely delete weak syllables. Rather, the data from the phonetic analysis indicate that some prosodic trace exists of the omitted syllable.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Phonotactic probabilities in young children's speech production.

This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and contained the identical coda across low and high phonotactic probability pairs. This allowed for comparisons of children's productions of the same coda consonant in low and high phonotactic probability environments. Children were significantly more likely to produce the same coda in high phonotactic probability non-words than in low phonotactic probability non-words. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonotactic probability is a predictor of coda production in English. Moreover, this finding provides further evidence for the role of the input and distribution of sound patterns in the ambient language as a basis for phonological acquisition.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2002

Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.

For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.

Attention↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Sensitivity to word order cues by normal and language/learning disabled adults.

UNLABELLED: Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 adults who lacked a personal or familial history of L/LD participated in a study designed to test sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. In an exposure phase, participants heard word strings constructed of novel CVC words for a period of 5 min. In a test phase, participants were asked to judge new sentences as either obeying or violating the rules of the grammar they heard. L/LD participants performed significantly below the comparison group on this task. The results suggest that this skill, which emerges early in life for normal children, is problematic for adults with L/LD. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will become familiar with a paradigm that allows assessment of rapid learning of word order rules and how this learning differs for normal and language/learning disabled adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Similarities in weak syllable omissions between children with specific language impairment and normally developing language: a preliminary report.

UNLABELLED: Two-year-olds with normally developing language (NL) and older children with specific language impairment (SLI) omit initial weak syllables from words (e.g., "banana" approximately "nana"). Previous research revealed a phonetic "trace" of syllables omitted by children with NL (Carter, 1999; Carter & Gerken, submitted for publication). The present study asked whether similar evidence could be found for omissions by children with SLI. Fourteen children with SLI produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names (e.g., "Feed_cinda," from "Feed Lucinda" vs. "Feed Cindy"). Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace remains. In addition, a phonological examination showed similarities between groups regarding sentential and syllabic factors that affect omission rates, as well as an interesting difference that suggests different strategies the groups use in acquiring adult targets. LEARNING OUTCOMES: As a result of reading this article, participants should (1) have a better understanding of similarities and differences in the language production of children with specific language impairment and normally developing language, with regard to prosodic development, (2) be familiar with several models of the phenomenon of weak syllable omissions in children's developing language, and (3) recognize the importance of using a combination of linguistic analysis types when studying issues in child language production.

Child↗