Language Learning Principle(1)
언어 학습 원리
Infants’ Selective Use of Reliable Cues
in Multidimensional Language Input
In school, learning experiences are carefully selected and organized to provide a systematic curriculum. In contrast, learning itself can happen in everyday life, where people learn and grow through their experiences—whether those experiences are positive or negative.
Infants are said to have the ability to find patterns when they experience the world. However, there hasn’t been much research on how they learn in the presence of such diverse information, and the study we examined focuses on the question, "So how do they learn?"
To put it simply, when faced with various information, infants tend to select and use only reliable cues.
This is quite a surprising fact. How can infants choose reliable cues?
This study examined how infants use different sounds and voices to find patterns in language through two experiments.
Infants aged 9 and 10 months listened to a male and a female speaker each using two different speech methods. One method followed a specific pattern (e.g., AAB, le-le-di), while the other did not. Half of the infants heard each speaker use only one method, while the other half heard each speaker use both methods equally.
In Experiment 1, the speech streams consisted of different sounds, and infants learned well even when there was no match between the speaker and the stream. However, in Experiment 2, the speech streams consisted of the same sounds, and despite having cues to help distinguish each stream, infants did not learn effectively.
These results suggest that while infants can learn in the presence of multiple speaking methods, they tend to rely more on sound distinctions. In other words, infants have the ability to selectively focus on the most useful cues amidst complex information in their environment.
In the next section, we will take a closer look at the research methods used.
References
Potter, C. E., & Lew-Williams, C. (2019). Infants' selective use of reliable cues in multidimensional language input. Developmental Psychology, 55, 1-8.
