When more is not better: Variable input in the formation of robust word representations
Andrea K. Davis, LouAnn Gerken · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
A number of studies with infants and with young children suggest that hearing words produced by multiple talkers helps learners to develop more robust word representations (Richtsmeier et al., 2009; Rost & McMurray, 2009, 2010). Native adult learners, however, do not seem to derive the same benefit from multiple talkers. A word-learning study with native adults was conducted, and a second study with second language learners will have been completed by this fall. Native-speaking participants learned four new minimal English-like minimal pair words either from a single talker or from multiple talkers. They were then tested with (a) a perceptual task, in which they saw the two pictures corresponding to a minimal pair, heard one of the pair, and had to choose the picture corresponding to the word they heard; (b) a speeded production task, in which they had to repeat the words they had just learned as quickly as possible. Unlike infants, the two groups did not differ significantly in perceptual accuracy. However, the single talker group had significantly higher variance in the speeded production task. It is hypothesized that this greater variance is due to individual differences in learning strategies, which are masked when learning from multiple talkers.