Jul 11
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Evans/etal:2009
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The results show that longer familiarization duration and more
speech-like cues (eg. actual phonemes from English language as
compared to non-speech sounds) aid the SLI impaired kid in statistical
learning. The non-affected children were able to apply
statistical-learning in all conditions. This suggests the impairment
of the SLI children is actually not specific to language but rather
due to eg. reduced working memory capacity.

It also may explain why SLI kids were unable to "retain in memory a
sufficiently detailed phonological form of the target words"
(p. 12). To be able to differentiate between phonologically similar
words and similar sound stimuli (even non-speech) requires either more
examples over time or a greater attention to detail, which likely has
plays a large role in maintaining different stimuli in working-memory.

Is the performance in the experiment constant? Or are there any other
patterns? Example: Does the performance deteriorate over the course of
the experiment?

In Evans et al., authors conclude that "aspects of vocabulary learning
are also supported by the implicit system, ..".  How does implicit
learning and declarative memory interact in the vocabulary learning?

Does the results of the experiments imply that children with SLI might
have trouble with any other abilities/learning that is reliant on the
implicit learning?

The results of the presented experiments show that children affected
by SLI have more difficulties recognizing the boundaries of words
based on tones than recognizing the boundaries of words based on
syllables. The authors state that this indicates that domain-general,
and not only domain-specific, learning abilities of children with SLI
are impaired. If the impairment of those children is domain-general,
however, should it not rather be the case that both kinds of tasks
lead to the same degree of difficulty?

What does implicit learning (mentioned several times in the article)
exactly mean?

Could the absence of acoustic word boundary cues or pauses in the
synthetic speech have affected the participant's ability to
detect/learn the statistical regularities between syllables?

Based on the following part:
"Importantly, however, for the above-chance SLI group, one word was
not learned. This word, tutibu (p = .37), had the second highest
transitional probability: 0.75. If the children with SLI were using
transitional probability as a cue to discover word boundaries within
the speech stream, why then, with double the exposure to the speech
stream, were they unable to discover the boundaries for the word
having the second highest transitional probability? Analysis of the
response patterns of the children revealed that the target/foil test
trials where the target and the foil had the identical vowel
sequence—tutibu/dupitu—had the highest error rate, with 7 of the 10
children with SLI incorrectly choosing the foil dubitu.....",

Given that the children with SLI were not able to recognize the word
with the second highest transitional probability, could we perhaps
assume that they are able to generalize but when it comes to
specifying in order to recognize the small differences between the 2
words, they have difficulties? Would that be in fact an issue
concerning the statistical learning or does that have to do with some
other process of language acquisition or processing?

The study indicates that children with SLI perform better with natural
speech than synthesized speech. What mechanisms might explain these
differences, and how should future research investigate this further?
Future research could involve experiments that directly compare the
effectiveness of natural and synthesized speech in various language
learning tasks and assess the specific auditory processing
difficulties faced by children with SLI. This should then help in
designing more effective and naturalistic language intervention
programs.