Who developed Statistical language acquisition?
Statistical language acquisition
One of the most used experimental paradigms in investigations of infants' capacities for statistical language acquisition is the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), developed by Stanford psychologist Anne Fernald in 1985 to study infants' preferences for prototypical child-directed speech over normal adult speech.[4] In the classic HPP paradigm, infants are allowed to freely turn their heads and are seated between two speakers with mounted lights. The light of either the right or left speaker then flashes as that speaker provides some type of audial or linguistic input stimulus to the infant. Reliable orientation to a given side is taken to be an indication of a preference for the input associated with that side's speaker. This paradigm has since become increasingly important in the study of infant speech perception, especially for input at levels higher than syllable chunks, though with some modifications, including using the listening times instead of the side preference as the relevant dependent measure.[5]
Statistical language acquisition
According to recent research, there is no neural evidence of statistical language learning in children with autism spectrum disorders. When exposed to a continuous stream of artificial speech, neurotypical children displayed less cortical activity in the dorsolateral frontal cortices (specifically the middle frontal gyrus) as cues for word boundaries increased. However activity in these networks remained unchanged in autistic children, regardless of the verbal cues provided. This evidence, highlighting the importance of proper Frontal Lobe brain function is in support of the "Executive Functions" Theory, used to explain some of the biologically related causes of Autistic language deficits. With impaired working memory, decision making, planning, and goal setting, which are vital functions of the Frontal Lobe, Autistic children are at loss when it comes to socializing and communication (Ozonoff, et al., 2004). Additionally, researchers have found that the level of communicative impairment in autistic children was inversely correlated with signal increases in these same regions during exposure to artificial languages. Based on this evidence, researchers have concluded that children with autism spectrum disorders don't have the neural architecture to identify word boundaries in continuous speech. Early word segmentation skills have been shown to predict later language development, which could explain why language delay is a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorders.[20]