Lev-Ari Shiri
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 24;12(8):e0183593. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183593. eCollection 2017.
We learn language from our social environment. In general, the more sources we have, the less informative each of them is, and the less weight we should assign it. If this is the case, people who interact with fewer others should be more susceptible to the influence of each of their interlocutors. This paper tests whether indeed people who interact with fewer other people have more malleable phonological representations. Using a perceptual learning paradigm, this paper shows that individuals who regularly interact with fewer others are more likely to change their boundary between /d/ and /t/ following exposure to an atypical speaker. It further shows that the effect of number of interlocutors is not due to differences in ability to learn the speaker's speech patterns, but specific to likelihood of generalizing the learned pattern. These results have implications for both language learning and language change, as they suggest that individuals with smaller social networks might play an important role in propagating linguistic changes.
我们从社会环境中学习语言。一般来说，我们拥有的信息源越多，每个信息源的信息量就越少，我们赋予它的权重也就越低。如果是这样的话，与他人互动较少的人应该更容易受到每个对话者的影响。本文测试了与他人互动较少的人是否确实具有更易变的语音表征。使用感知学习范式，本文表明，经常与他人互动较少的个体在接触到非典型发音者后，更有可能改变他们在/d/和/t/之间的界限。它进一步表明，对话者数量的影响不是由于学习说话者语音模式的能力差异，而是特定于将所学模式泛化的可能性。这些结果对语言学习和语言变化都有影响，因为它们表明社交网络较小的个体可能在传播语言变化方面发挥重要作用。
