What are the statistics in statistical learning?
Lori L. Holt, Andrew J. Lotto · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2003
The idea that speech perception is shaped by the statistical structure of the input is gaining wide enthusiasm and growing empirical support. Nonetheless, statistics and statistical learning are broad terms with many possible interpretations and, perhaps, many potential underlying mechanisms. In order to define the role of statistics in speech perception mechanistically, we will need to more precisely define the statistics of statistical learning and examine similarities and differences across subgroups. In this talk, we examine learning of four types of information: (1) acoustic variance that is defining for contrastive categories, (2) the correlation between acoustic attributes or linguistic features, (3) the probability or frequency of events or a series of events, (4) the shape of input distributions. We present representative data from online speech perception and speech development and discuss inter-relationships among the subgroups. [Work supported by NSF, NIH and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.]