![]() One semantic regularity that does not rely on contingent feedback and that can help solve referential ambiguity is the co-occurrence of words and referents. The authors argue that by relying on phonological information to make initial guesses, learners would be better situated to learn word-referent relations in complex ambiguous contexts, and this initial bias could have a cascading effect on word learning. Once feedback started, participants ignored typicality and relied on mutual exclusivity to map novel words. Following their initial associations, they received feedback on their choices. Results showed that participants relied on typicality to make initial associations, choosing actions or objects as a function of the labels’ typicality as verbs or nouns. Novel words had different degrees of phonological typicality as verbs or nouns. Children (7-years-old) were presented with ambiguous trials with a novel word and two pictures depicting actions or objects. It is calculated by computing the distance of each phonemes’ features, in each word position, in relation to words from the same lexical category. Phonological typicality indexes how typical the phonology of a word is in relation to its lexical category (e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives). ( 2009) has begun to shed some light on this issue by investigating how a related phonological cue, namely phonological typicality, impacts word learning in ambiguous contexts. Thus, it is important to understand how phonotactic probabilities impact word learning in these more ecologically relevant (i.e., ambiguous) contexts. In natural contexts, however, word learning usually unfolds across ambiguous contexts (e.g., Clerkin et al., 2017). Most of these studies use unambiguous word learning paradigms, in which one novel word is paired with one novel referent in a given trial. By doing so, research has shown that, across the lifespan, words with higher phonotactic probabilities are learned faster and with greater accuracy than words with lower phonotactic probabilities (e.g., Benitez & Saffran, 2021 Estes & Bowen, 2013 Estes et al., 2011 Steber & Rossi, 2020 Storkel et al., 2013 Sundara et al., 2022 but see Cristia, 2018). 1 One way to investigate the role phonotactic probabilities play in word learning is to create novel words with different degrees of phonotactic probabilities and then pair them with novel referents. For instance, due to variations in the phonotactic probabilities of their initial biphones, the word fall has an overall higher phonotactic probability than the word tall but has a lower phonotactic probability than the word call. Words with higher phonotactic probabilities contain common segments from a language, whereas words with lower phonotactic probabilities contain less frequent segments. One phonological regularity that has been shown to influence word learning is phonotactic probability, which can be defined as positional statistics that represent how frequently phonological segments happen together in a given language (Vitevitch & Luce, 2004). Most everyday word learning unfolds in phonologically rich and referentially ambiguous contexts (Quine, 1960).
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