COGS 101B Week 6

Wed: 9:00 9:50 am

 Recall from last week: statistical learning

Infants can learn where word boundaries are given the
transitional probabilities between words Test: string many speech sounds together and see if they can tell the different. (novelty preference)

Works for language, tone sequences, sequences of

visual stimuli, textile sequences, etc. Easier to identify auditory stimuli vs visual stimuli. (in

general people are better at perceiving time relations than spatial relations) But slowing the rate of presentation for visual stimuli helps
performance.

Nonadjacent Dependencies
Non-adjacent = not right next to each other Dependent on linguistic structure that is learnable
through input. (like like either.or, knowing that something is in the past tense when we hear got _____ed).

Newport and Aslin, 2004

In order to learn this predictability, information needs
to be of like kind. (same segment type, consonantconsonant, vowel-vowel, but not syllables).

How do we know what things go together?

Gestalt grouping cues
We perceive things as grouped together when they are
next to each other in time or space Works for vision and audition

What influences whether or not we perceive things as

grouped? How fast notes are played, pitch proximity, frequency of co-occurrence

Creel, Newport and Aslin Study

Looked at how grouping strategies and perceptual
statistics) that either had the same pitch range or different pitch range. Do people group by pitch or temporal proximity? People were played a string of notes Apredicted tone b predicted tone C People had to skip over intervening notes in the similar
pitch condition (more difficult) but not an issue in different pitch condition. Then played legal and illegal non-adjacent sequences and adjacent sequences

learning interact Played tones in two statistical grouping (nonadjacent

Findings:
Similar pitch condition:
People do not learn nonadjacent sequences (at
chance) They learn tone to tone temporal sequence

Different pitch condition:

Learned non-adjacent sequences Did not learn adjacent sequences of tones temporally
close together but far apart in pitch proximity

Experimental Data cont.

Added another test condition, where they added a
tone were in same frequency range, so harmonics dont overlap

different timbres (tone quality, clarity) In this case, they ensured that fundamentals of each

In both different pitch and timbres experiments,

people learned non-adjacent tone relationships, but did poorly at learning ones that are temporally adjacent

Experimental Data cont.

Now added a bigger timbre difference (like flute vs
violin, which are more discernably different, but harmonics DO overlap)

In original timbre experiment (no overlapping of

harmonics), people learned non-adjacent tones, but were at chance for adjacent tones) non-adjacent and adjacent tone relationships above chance

In flute vs violin timbre experiment, people learned

General Principles:
General auditory perceptual principles may
constrain learning of both speech statistics and non-speech statistics (like for musical tone sequences) (especially for consonant-consonant transitions, vowel-vowel transitions, flute-flute transitions, violin-violin transitions, etc.).

We see similar effects across both domains

For perceive temporal sequences audition is better For perceiving spatial sequences, vision is better