Posted: Jan 25, 2012 5:04 pm
Well that's a term i hadn't heard before. I had a quick look at the article and then did a google on statistical language learning. Not really helpful as nobody seems to want to define their terms succinctly. This is typical of many wooly concepts in the Psycholinguistic literature of early child language acquisition I fear.
What I did seem to glean from this quick search is that this area MIGHT be emphasising learning by exposure alone. Whereas a Behavioural approach would emphasise the importance of reinforcement in shaping language learning.
The video that tuco posted of Patricia Kuhl seems to be saying that babies will learn foreign sounds by some mystical ability to "take statistics" of the sounds by exposure to them. She then goes on to highlight how important it is for there to be a human present to speak these words to the baby. So they don't learn the new sounds from exposure alone then ....duh!!!!
When a human is present in these sorts of studies, as it is in Kuhl's video it is impossible to control for the effects of reinforcement by the researcher/reader of words. So any inferences that they are learning via some complicated mental reasoning strategy, or indeed by some innate and mysterious language acquisition device, can be taken with a pince of salt
What I did seem to glean from this quick search is that this area MIGHT be emphasising learning by exposure alone. Whereas a Behavioural approach would emphasise the importance of reinforcement in shaping language learning.
The video that tuco posted of Patricia Kuhl seems to be saying that babies will learn foreign sounds by some mystical ability to "take statistics" of the sounds by exposure to them. She then goes on to highlight how important it is for there to be a human present to speak these words to the baby. So they don't learn the new sounds from exposure alone then ....duh!!!!
When a human is present in these sorts of studies, as it is in Kuhl's video it is impossible to control for the effects of reinforcement by the researcher/reader of words. So any inferences that they are learning via some complicated mental reasoning strategy, or indeed by some innate and mysterious language acquisition device, can be taken with a pince of salt