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Something old and something new

Word learning as the interaction of statistical association and dynamic competition

McMurray, B., Apfelbaum, K. S., Toscano, J. C., & Samuelson, L. K. (2010, March). Paper presented at the 2010 International Conference on Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD.

Abstract:

Research on word learning is riddled with meta-theoretical claims about the difficulty of the problem–the amount of ambiguity; the rate of acquisition; non-obvious or conceptual information sources—that point toward specialized mechanisms attuned for lexical development... Read more →

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Statistical learning, cross-linguistic constraints, and the acquisition of speech categories

A computational approach

Toscano, J. C. and McMurray, B. (2005, November). Paper presented at the 11th Midcontinental Workshop on Phonology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Abstract:

Infants learning the phonetic categories of their native language must recognize which distinctions are relevant to their language and which are not. While they initially discriminate both native and non-native phoneme contrasts, infants quickly learn to discriminate only those contrasts that are present in their language (Werker & Tees, 1984), and eventually form language-appropriate phonetic categories... Read more →

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