Banai Karen, Yifat Rachel
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2016 Feb;142:118-36. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.10.001. Epub 2015 Nov 6.
Although the contribution of perceptual processes to language skills during infancy is well recognized, the role of perception in linguistic processing beyond infancy is not well understood. In the experiments reported here, we asked whether manipulating the perceptual context in which stimuli are presented across trials influences how preschool children perform visual (shape-size identification; Experiment 1) and auditory (syllable identification; Experiment 2) tasks. Another goal was to determine whether the sensitivity to perceptual context can explain part of the variance in oral language skills in typically developing preschool children. Perceptual context was manipulated by changing the relative frequency with which target visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiment 2) stimuli were presented in arrays of fixed size, and identification of the target stimuli was tested. Oral language skills were assessed using vocabulary, word definition, and phonological awareness tasks. Changes in perceptual context influenced the performance of the majority of children on both identification tasks. Sensitivity to perceptual context accounted for 7% to 15% of the variance in language scores. We suggest that context effects are an outcome of a statistical learning process. Therefore, the current findings demonstrate that statistical learning can facilitate both visual and auditory identification processes in preschool children. Furthermore, consistent with previous findings in infants and in older children and adults, individual differences in statistical learning were found to be associated with individual differences in language skills of preschool children.
尽管感知过程在婴儿期对语言技能的贡献已得到充分认可，但感知在婴儿期之后的语言处理中的作用却尚未得到很好的理解。在本文所报告的实验中，我们探讨了在不同试验中操纵刺激呈现的感知背景是否会影响学龄前儿童执行视觉（形状 - 大小识别；实验1）和听觉（音节识别；实验2）任务的方式。另一个目标是确定对感知背景的敏感度是否可以解释典型发育的学龄前儿童口语技能差异的一部分。通过改变目标视觉（实验1）和听觉（实验2）刺激在固定大小阵列中呈现的相对频率来操纵感知背景，并测试目标刺激的识别。使用词汇、单词定义和语音意识任务来评估口语技能。感知背景的变化影响了大多数儿童在两项识别任务中的表现。对感知背景的敏感度占语言分数差异的7%至15%。我们认为背景效应是统计学习过程的结果。因此，当前的研究结果表明，统计学习可以促进学龄前儿童的视觉和听觉识别过程。此外，与之前在婴儿以及年龄较大的儿童和成人中的研究结果一致，发现统计学习中的个体差异与学龄前儿童语言技能的个体差异相关。
