Lev-Ari Shiri
1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
2 Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Oct;71(10):2249-2260. doi: 10.1177/1747021817739865. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
Infants and adults learn new phonological varieties better when exposed to multiple rather than a single speaker. This article tests whether having a larger social network similarly facilitates phonological performance. Experiment 1 shows that people with larger social networks are better at vowel perception in noise, indicating that the benefit of laboratory exposure to multiple speakers extends to real life experience and to adults tested in their native language. Furthermore, the experiment shows that this association is not due to differences in amount of input or to cognitive differences between people with different social network sizes. Follow-up computational simulations reveal that the benefit of larger social networks is mostly due to increased input variability. Additionally, the simulations show that the boost that larger social networks provide is independent of the amount of input received but is larger if the population is more heterogeneous. Finally, a comparison of "adult" and "child" simulations reconciles previous conflicting findings by suggesting that input variability along the relevant dimension might be less useful at the earliest stages of learning. Together, this article shows when and how the size of our social network influences our speech perception. It thus shows how aspects of our lifestyle can influence our linguistic performance.
婴儿和成年人在接触多个说话者而非单个说话者时，能更好地学习新的语音变体。本文测试了拥有更大的社交网络是否同样有助于语音表现。实验1表明，社交网络更大的人在噪声环境中对元音的感知能力更强，这表明在实验室中接触多个说话者的益处延伸到了现实生活体验以及以母语进行测试的成年人身上。此外，该实验表明这种关联并非源于输入量的差异或不同社交网络规模人群之间的认知差异。后续的计算模拟揭示，更大社交网络的益处主要归因于输入变异性的增加。此外，模拟结果表明，更大社交网络所带来的提升与所接收的输入量无关，但如果人群更加多样化，则提升幅度会更大。最后，对“成人”和“儿童”模拟的比较通过表明在学习的最早阶段，沿相关维度的输入变异性可能用处较小，从而调和了先前相互矛盾的研究结果。总之，本文展示了我们社交网络的规模何时以及如何影响我们的语音感知。因此，它展示了我们生活方式的各个方面如何影响我们的语言表现。
