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Until recently, most behavioral studies of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have used standardized assessments as a means to probe etiology and to characterize phenotypes. Over the past decade, however, tasks originally developed to investigate learning processes in typical development have been brought to bear on developmental processes in children with IDD. This brief review will focus on one learning process in particular—statistical learning—and will provide an overview of what has been learned thus far from studies using statistical learning tasks with different groups of children with IDD conditions. While a full picture is not yet available, results to date suggest that studies of learning are both feasible and informative about learning processes that may differ across diagnostic groups, particularly as they relate to language acquisition. More generally, studies focused on learning processes may be highly informative about different developmental trajectories both across groups and within groups of children.

Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning. To test this hypothesis, 3‐year‐olds (N = 36) were shown novel objects paired with familiar objects that varied in their visual salience. When the novel objects were labeled, children were slower and less accurate at fixating them in the presence of highly salient familiar objects than in the presence of less salient familiar objects. They were also less successful in retaining these word‐referent pairings. While familiar objects may facilitate novel word learning in ambiguous situations, the properties of familiar objects matter.

Infants are highly sensitive to statistical patterns in their auditory language input that mark word categories (e.g., noun and verb). However, it is unknown whether experience with these cues facilitates the acquisition of semantic properties of word categories. In a study testing this hypothesis, infants first listened to an artificial language in which word categories were reliably distinguished by statistical cues (experimental group) or in which these properties did not cue category membership (control group). Both groups were then trained on identical pairings between the words and pictures from two categories (animals and vehicles). Only infants in the experimental group learned the trained associations between specific words and pictures. Moreover, these infants generalized the pattern to include novel pairings. These results suggest that experience with statistical cues marking lexical categories sets the stage for learning the meanings of individual words and for generalizing meanings to new category members.

To acquire the words of their language, learners face the challenge of tracking regularities at multiple levels of abstraction from continuous speech. In the current study, we examined adults’ ability to track two types of regularities from a continuous artificial speech stream: the individual words in the speech stream (token level information), and a phonotactic pattern shared by a subset of those words (type level information). We additionally manipulated exposure time to the language to examine the relationship between the acquisition of these two regularities. Using a ratings test procedure, we found that adults can extract both the words in the language and their phonotactic patterns from continuous speech in as little as 3.5 minutes of listening time. Results from a 2AFC testing method provide converging evidence that adults rapidly learn both words and their phonotactic patterns. Together, the findings suggest that adults are capable of concurrently tracking regularities at multiple levels of abstraction from brief exposures to a continuous stream of speech.

What types of mechanisms underlie the acquisition of human language? Recent evidence suggests that learners, including infants, can use statistical properties of linguistic input to discover structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. These abilities appear to be both powerful and constrained, such that some statistical patterns are more readily detected and used than others. Implications for the structure of human languages are discussed.

Numerous studies over the past decade support the claim that infants are equipped with powerful statistical language learning mechanisms. The primary evidence for statistical language learning in word segmentation comes from studies using artificial languages, continuous streams of synthesized syllables that are highly simplified relative to real speech. To what extent can these conclusions be scaled up to natural language learning? In the current experiments, English-learning 8-month-old infants' ability to track transitional probabilities in fluent infant-directed Italian speech was tested (N = 72). The results suggest that infants are sensitive to transitional probability cues in unfamiliar natural language stimuli, and support the claim that statistical learning is sufficiently robust to support aspects of real-world language acquisition.

Language is used to identify objects in many different ways. An apple can be identified using its name, color, and other attributes. Skilled language comprehension requires listeners to flexibly shift between different dimensions. We asked whether this shifting would be difficult for 3-year-olds, who have relatively immature executive function skills and struggle to switch between dimensions in card sorting tasks. In the current experiment, children first heard a series of sentences identifying objects using a single dimension (either names or colors). In the second half of the experiment, the labeling dimension was switched. Children were significantly less accurate in fixating the correct object following the dimensional switch. This disruption, however, was temporary; recognition accuracy recovered with increased exposure to the new labeling dimension. These findings provide the first evidence that children's difficulty in shifting between dimensions impacts their ability to comprehend speech. This limitation may affect children's ability to form rich, multi-dimensional representations when learning new words.

Jenny R. Saffran Kathryn Robe-Torres University of Wisconsin–Madison Contact author: Julia L. Evans, School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1518. E-mail: jevans{at}mail.sdsu.edu . Purpose: In this study, the authors examined (a) whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) can implicitly compute the probabilities of adjacent sound sequences, (b) if this ability is related to degree of exposure, (c) if it is domain specific or domain general and, (d) if it is related to vocabulary. Method: Children with SLI and normal language controls (ages 6;5–14;4 [years;months]) listened to 21 min of a language in which transitional probabilities within words were higher than those between words. In a second study, children with SLI and Age–Nonverbal IQ matched controls (8;0–10;11) listened to the same language for 42 min and to a second 42 min \"tone\" language containing the identical statistical structure as the \"speech\" language. Results: After 21 min, the SLI group's performance was at chance, whereas performance for the control group was significantly greater than chance and significantly correlated with receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge. In the 42-minute speech condition, the SLI group's performance was significantly greater than chance and correlated with receptive vocabulary but was no different from chance in the analogous 42-minute tone condition. Performance for the control group was again significantly greater than chance in 42-minute speech and tone conditions. Conclusions: These findings suggest that poor implicit learning may underlie aspects of the language impairments in SLI. KEY WORDS: specific language impairment, implicit learning, statistical learning, child language development, child language disorders CiteULike     Connotea     Del.icio.us     Digg     Facebook     Reddit     Technorati     Twitter     What's this?

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels contained the same syllable produced with distinct pitch contours (Mandarin lexical tones). The youngest infants learned the label–object mappings, but the older groups did not, despite being able to discriminate pitch differences in an object-free task (Experiment 3, N = 14). Results indicate that 14-month-olds remain flexible regarding what sounds make meaningful distinctions between words. By 17–19 months, experience with a nontonal native language constrains infants' interpretation of lexical tone.

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing—a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps because participants were adolescents and/or children with strong language skills. This study examined incremental language processing and receptive language in young children with ASD with a range of language skills. Children showed a head start when presented with semantically-constraining verbs (e.g., Read the book ) compared to neutral verbs (e.g., Find the book ). Children with weaker receptive language showed a smaller head start than children with stronger receptive language skills, suggesting continuity between typical development and ASD.