Incidental Language Learning: Listening (and Learning) Out of the Corner of Your Ear

TLDR

Word segmentation from continuous speech is a crucial initial component of language acquisition. The study examined how first‑grade children and adults perform on an incidental language‑learning task. Participants were briefly exposed to an unsegmented artificial language presented auditorily, relying only on transitional probabilities between syllables, while engaged in a cover task of creating computer illustrations. Both adults and children successfully learned the language words, with children performing as well as adults, indicating that transitional‑probability‑based statistical learning operates incidentally in both age groups.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the performance of first-grade children and adults on an incidental language-learning task. Learning entailed word segmentation from continuous speech, an initial and crucial component of language acquisition. Subjects were briefly exposed to an unsegmented artificial language, presented auditorily, in which the only cues to word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. Subjects were not told that they were listening to a language, or even to listen at all; rather, they were engaged in a cover task of creating computer illustrations. Both adults and children learned the words of the language. Moreover, the children performed as well as the adults. These data suggest that a statistical learning mechanism (transitional probability computation) is able to operate incidentally and, surprisingly, as well in children as in adults.