Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt Scopus, Israel.
The Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Israel.
Cognition. 2024 Dec;253:105932. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105932. Epub 2024 Aug 31.
The word-frequency distributions children hear during language learning are highly skewed (Zipfian). Previous studies suggest that such skewed environments confer a learnability advantage in tasks that require the learner to discover the units that have to be learned, as in word-segmentation or cross-situational learning. This facilitative effect has been attributed to contextual facilitation from high frequency items in learning lower frequency items, and to better learning under the increased predictability (lower entropy) of skewed distributions. Here, we ask whether Zipfian distributions facilitate learning beyond the discovery of units, as expected under the predictability account. We tested children's learning of novel word-referent mappings in a learning task where each mapping was presented in isolation during training, and did not need to be dicovered. We compared learning in a uniform environment to two skewed environments with different entropy levels. Children's learning was overall better in the two skewed environments, even for low frequency items. These results extend the facilitative effect of Zipfian distributions to additional learning tasks and show they can facilitate language learning beyond the discovery of units.
儿童在语言学习中听到的词汇频率分布高度偏态（符合齐夫定律）。先前的研究表明，在需要学习者发现必须学习的单位的任务中，这种偏态环境赋予了可学习性优势，例如在分词或跨情境学习中。这种促进作用归因于从学习较低频率项目的高频项目中获得的上下文促进作用，以及在增加可预测性（较低熵）的偏态分布下的更好学习。在这里，我们询问齐夫定律是否会促进单元发现之外的学习，正如可预测性解释所预期的那样。我们在学习任务中测试了儿童对新单词-指称映射的学习，在该任务中，每个映射在训练期间都是单独呈现的，不需要被发现。我们将学习环境与两种具有不同熵水平的偏态环境进行了比较。即使对于低频项目，儿童在两个偏态环境中的学习总体上也更好。这些结果将齐夫定律偏态分布的促进作用扩展到了其他学习任务，并表明它们可以促进语言学习，而不仅仅是发现单元。
