Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Who developed 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]
Bates and Elman summarised a research conducted by Saffran, Aslin and Newport that supports that learning is "a purely inductive, statistically driven process". In the research, it was found that 8 month old infants were able to use simple statistics to identify word boundaries in speech. The results of the research highlight that language acquisition is a process of learning through statistical means. Moreover, it raises the possibility that infants possess experience-dependent mechanisms that allow for word segmentation and acquisition of other aspects of language. As a result, Bates and Elman found that this contradicts the extensive view that human beings are unable and cannot utilize generalized statistical procedures for language acquisition. This is empirical evidence for linguistic empiricism, thereby going against the innateness hypothesis.
The statistical abilities are effective, but also limited by what qualifies as input, what is done with that input, and by the structure of the resulting output. One should also note that statistical learning (and more broadly, distributional learning) can be accepted as a component of language acquisition by researchers on either side of the "nature and nurture" debate. From the perspective of that debate, an important question is whether statistical learning can, by itself, serve as an alternative to nativist explanations for the grammatical constraints of human language.
Chomsky is very critical of this empirical theory of language acquisition. He has said, "It's true there's been a lot of work on trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems. I think there have been some successes, but a lot of failures." He claims the idea of using statistical methods to acquire language is simply a mimicry of the process, rather than a true understanding of how language is acquired.[3]
The lack of socialization can significantly impact a child’s emotional well-being. A child’s first experience with social communication typically begins at home, but deaf and hard of hearing children in particular who are born to hearing parents tend to struggle with this interaction, due to the fact that they are a “minority in their own family". Parents who have a Deaf child typically do not know a signed language, the logistical problem can become how to give that child a full language. If deaf and hard of hearing children are not developing their social skills at home, by the time they enter school, they can be behind in this development. All of this can lead to struggles with proper emotional development. It can be hard on a child who was not given a language early to try and express their emotions appropriately. The problem is not with the deaf child, but instead, not giving a deaf or hard of hearing child the necessary language access from birth that other children receive. There are theories to suggest that language acquisition is a predictor of how a child can develop Theory of Mind and without a full language, this skill becomes null. Theory of Mind can be an indicator of social and cognitive development. Without language acquisition, Deaf children can become behind in Theory of Mind and the skills that coincide, which can lead to further social and emotional delays.
Quantum is a software package and programming language for statistical survey data validation and manipulation and tabulation. Originally developed by Quantime to run on Unix systems, it was incorporated into SPSS Inc.'s "SPSS MR" product line  after its acquisition of Quantime on September 1997.
Much of the early work using statistical learning paradigms focused on the ability for children or adults to learn a single language,[1] consistent with the process of language acquisition for monolingual speakers or learners. However, it is estimated that approximately 60-75% of people in the world are bilingual.[23] More recently, researchers have begun looking at the role of statistical learning for those who speak more than one language. Although there are no reviews on this topic yet, Weiss, Gerfen, and Mitchel examined how hearing input from multiple artificial languages simultaneously can affect the ability to learn either or both languages.[24] Over four experiments, Weiss et al. found that, after exposure to two artificial languages, adult learners are capable of determining word boundaries in both languages when each language is spoken by a different speaker. However, when the two languages were spoken by the same speaker, participants were able learn both languages only when they were “congruent”—when the word boundaries of one language matched the word boundaries of the other. When the languages were incongruent—a syllable that appeared in the middle of a word in one language appeared at the end of the word in the other language—and spoken by a single speaker, participants were able to learn, at best, one of the two languages. A final experiment showed that the inability to learn incongruent languages spoken in the same voice was not due to syllable overlap between the languages but due to differing word boundaries.
Additionally, statistical learning by itself cannot account even for those aspects of language acquisition for which it has been shown to play a large role. For example, Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu found that young English-learning infants who spent time in a laboratory session with a native Mandarin speaker were able to distinguish between phonemes that occur in Mandarin but not in English, unlike infants who were in a control condition.[32] Infants in this control condition came to the lab as often as infants in the experimental condition, but were exposed only to English; when tested at a later date, they were unable to distinguish the Mandarin phonemes. In a second experiment, the authors presented infants with audio or audiovisual recordings of Mandarin speakers and tested the infants’ ability to distinguish between the Mandarin phonemes. In this condition, infants failed to distinguish the foreign language phonemes. This finding indicates that social interaction is a necessary component of language learning and that, even if infants are presented with the raw data of hearing a language, they are unable to take advantage of the statistical cues present in that data if they are not also experiencing the social interaction.[11]
The empiricist theory suggests, contra Chomsky, that there is enough information in the linguistic input children receive and therefore, there is no need to assume an innate language acquisition device exists (see above). Rather than a LAD evolved specifically for language, empiricists believe that general brain processes are sufficient enough for language acquisition. During this process, it is necessary for the child to actively engage with their environment. For a child to learn language, the parent or caregiver adopts a particular way of appropriately communicating with the child; this is known as child-directed speech (CDS). CDS is used so that children are given the necessary linguistic information needed for their language. Empiricism is a general approach and sometimes goes along with the interactionist approach. Statistical language acquisition, which falls under empiricist theory, suggests that infants acquire language by means of pattern perception.
Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran, emphasize the possible roles of general learning mechanisms, especially statistical learning, in language acquisition. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's detection of word boundaries. In a series of connectionist model simulations Franklin Chang has demonstrated that such domain general statistical learning mechanism could explain a wide range of language structure acquisition phenomena.
Together, the findings from these studies of statistical learning in language acquisition indicate that statistical properties of the language are a strong cue in helping infants learn their first language.[1]
Models that make use of these probabilistic methods have been able to merge the previously dichotomous language acquisition perspectives of social theories that emphasize the importance of learning speaker intentions and statistical and associative theories that rely on cross-situational contexts into a single joint-inference problem. This approach has led to important results in explaining acquisition phenomena such as mutual exclusivity, one-trial learning or fast mapping, and the use of social intentions.[28]
In response to both the previous hypotheses mentioned, the "Interdependent Development Hypothesis" emerged with the idea that there is some sort of interaction between the two language systems in acquisition. It proposed that there is no single language system, but the language systems are not completely separate either. This hypothesis is also known as the "Crosslinguistic Hypothesis", developed by Hulk and Müller. The "Crosslinguistic Hypothesis" states that influence will occur in bilingual acquisition in areas of particular difficulty, even for monolingual native language acquisition. It re-examined the extent of the differentiation of the language systems due to the interaction in difficult areas of bilingual acquisition. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from delay, acceleration, and transfer in particular areas of bilingual language acquisition. Delay is the acquisition of a property of language A later than normally expected because of the acquisition of language B. CLI is seen when the child has a dominant language, such as Cantonese influencing English when Cantonese is the dominant language, and it will only occur in certain domains. Below are the two proposals represented in the "Crosslinguistic Hypothesis" where CLI may occur.
Since the development of the "Crosslinguistic Hypothesis", much research has contributed to the understanding of CLI in areas of structural overlap, directionality, dominance, interfaces, the role of input, and the role of processing and production.
Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.
Early successes such as these paved the way for dynamical systems research into linguistic acquisition, answering many questions about early linguistic development but leaving many others unanswered, such as how these statistically acquired lexemes are represented.[23] Of particular importance in recent research has been the effort to understand the dynamic interaction of learning (e.g. language-based) and learner (e.g. speaker-based) variables in lexical organization and competition in bilinguals.[21] In the ceaseless effort to move toward more psychologically realistic models, many researchers have turned to a subset of associative models, self-organizing maps (SOMs), as established, cognitively plausible models of language development.[25][26]
It is now commonly accepted that children use some form of perceptual distributional learning, by which categories are discovered by clumping similar instances of an input stimulus, to form phonetic categories early in life.[5] Developing children have been found to be effective judges of linguistic authority, screening the input they model their language on by shifting their attention less to speakers who mispronounce words.[5] Infants also use statistical tracking to calculate the likelihood that particular phonemes will follow each other.[14]
It is possible that the kinds of language experience and knowledge gained through the statistical learning of the first language influences one's acquisition of a second language. Some research points to the possibility that the difficulty of learning a second language may be derived from the structural patterns and language cues that one has already picked up from his or her acquisition of first language. In that sense, the knowledge of and skills to process the first language from statistical acquisition may act as a complicating factor when one tries to learn a new language with different sentence structures, grammatical rules, and speech patterns.
Some models of language acquisition have been based on adaptive parsing[32] and grammar induction algorithms.[33]
Later studies expanded these results by looking at the actual behavior of children or adults who had been exposed to artificial grammars.[9] These later studies also considered the role of statistical learning more broadly than the earlier studies, placing their results in the context of the statistical learning mechanisms thought to be involved with other aspects of language learning, such as lexical acquisition.
Statistical learning theory suggests that, when learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. That is, language learners are sensitive to how often syllable combinations or words occur in relation to other syllables. Infants between 21 months and 23 months old are also able to use statistical learning to develop "lexical categories", such as an animal category, which infants might later map to newly learned words in the same category. These findings suggest that early experience listening to language is critical to vocabulary acquisition.
The role of statistical learning in language acquisition has been particularly well documented in the area of lexical acquisition.[1] One important contribution to infants' understanding of segmenting words from a continuous stream of speech is their ability to recognize statistical regularities of the speech heard in their environments.[1] Although many factors play an important role, this specific mechanism is powerful and can operate over a short time scale.[1]
Some algorithms for language acquisition are based on statistical machine translation. Language acquisition can be modeled as a machine learning process using grammar induction algorithms.
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories, in that they assume the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful chunks of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories and the acquisition of phonological knowledge. The approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children's utterances; and they have simulated phenomena in several languages, including English, Spanish, and German.
Since the initial discovery of the role of statistical learning in lexical acquisition, the same mechanism has been proposed for elements of phonological acquisition, and syntactical acquisition, as well as in non-linguistic domains. Further research has also indicated that statistical learning is likely a domain-general and even species-general learning mechanism, occurring for visual as well as auditory information, and in both primates and non-primates.
The question of how languages influence one another within a bilingual individual can be addressed both with respect to mature bilinguals and with respect to bilingual language acquisition. With respect to bilingual language acquisition in children, there are several hypotheses that examine the internal representation of bilinguals' languages. Volterra and Taeschner proposed the "Single System Hypothesis," which states that children start out with one single system that develops into two systems. This hypothesis proposed that bilingual children go through three stages of acquisition.
In response to the "Single System Hypothesis", a different hypothesis developed regarding the idea of two separate language systems from the very beginning. It was based on evidence of monolinguals and bilinguals reaching the same milestones at approximately the same stage of development. For example, bilingual and monolingual children go through identical patterns of grammar development. This hypothesis, called the "Separate Development Hypothesis", held the notion that the bilinguals acquiring two languages would internalize and acquire the two languages separately. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from lack of transfer and lack of acceleration. Transfer is a grammatical property of one language used in another language. Acceleration is the acquisition of a feature in language A facilitating the acquisition of a feature in language B. In a study of Dutch-English bilingual children, there were no instances of transfer across elements of morphology and syntactic development, indicating that the two languages developed separately from each other. In addition, in a study of French-English bilingual children, there were no instances of acceleration because finiteness appeared much earlier in French than it did in English, suggesting that there was no facilitation of the acquisition of finiteness in English by acquisition in French. Under this hypothesis, bilingual acquisition would be equivalent to monolingual children acquiring the particular languages.