Creel Sarah C
Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive Mail Code 0515, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 May;81(4):948-957. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-01663-7.
How do learners build up auditory pattern knowledge? Findings from children's spoken word learning suggest more robust auditory representations for highly familiar words than for newly learned words. This argues against spoken language learning as a process of simply acquiring a fixed set of speech sound categories, suggesting instead that specific words may be the relevant units. More generally, one might state this as the specific-learning hypothesis-that acquiring sound pattern knowledge involves learning specific patterns, rather than abstract pattern components. To understand the nature of human language knowledge, it is important to determine whether this specific learning reflects processes unique to spoken language learning or instead reflects more general auditory-learning processes. To investigate whether the specific-learning hypothesis extends to auditory pattern learning more generally, the present study tested the perceptual processing of familiar melodies versus carefully matched unfamiliar melodies. Children performed better at both audiovisual mapping (Exp. 1) and same-different auditory discrimination (Exp. 2) when hearing familiar melodies than when hearing unfamiliar melodies. This is consistent with the specific-learning hypothesis and with exemplar-style general-auditory accounts of pattern learning, although alternative explanations are possible.
学习者是如何建立听觉模式知识的？儿童口语单词学习的研究结果表明，与新学单词相比，高度熟悉的单词具有更强健的听觉表征。这与将口语学习视为简单获取一组固定语音类别过程的观点相悖，相反，这表明特定的单词可能是相关单元。更一般地说，人们可以将此表述为特定学习假说——即获得声音模式知识涉及学习特定模式，而非抽象的模式成分。为了理解人类语言知识的本质，确定这种特定学习是反映口语学习特有的过程，还是反映更一般的听觉学习过程至关重要。为了更广泛地研究特定学习假说是否适用于听觉模式学习，本研究测试了熟悉旋律与精心匹配的不熟悉旋律的感知处理。与听到不熟悉旋律时相比，儿童在听到熟悉旋律时，在视听映射（实验1）和异同听觉辨别（实验2）任务中表现更好。这与特定学习假说以及模式学习的样例式一般听觉理论相符，尽管也可能有其他解释。
