ArticleCognition2020
Of mice and men: Speech sound acquisition as discriminative learning from prediction error, not just statistical tracking.
Article in Cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- From Feedback-Learning to Semantic Memory: Can Feedback-Related Brain Activity Predict Object-Word Associations?Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Changes in the Structure of Speech Categorization Across School Age Years: Children Become More Gradient and More Consistent.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Reduced Cochlear Implant Performance in Listeners with Single-Sided Deafness: Comparison with Bilateral Listeners.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2025Article
- Exploring the effectiveness of reward-based learning strategies for second-language speech sounds.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology.Psychological research · 2024Review
- Incidental auditory category learning and visuomotor sequence learning do not compete for cognitive resources.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- The acquisition of speech categories: Beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2023Article
- LDL-AURIS: a computational model, grounded in error-driven learning, for the comprehension of single spoken words.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2023Article
- Long-term priors constrain category learning in the context of short-term statistical regularities.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- An exploration of error-driven learning in simple two-layer networks from a discriminative learning perspective.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- N400 Evidence That the Early Stages of Lexical Access Ignore Knowledge About Phonological Alternations.Language and speech · 2022Article
- A neural network model of the effect of prior experience with regularities on subsequent category learning.Cognition · 2022Article
- Understanding the Phonetic Characteristics of Speech Under Uncertainty-Implications of the Representation of Linguistic Knowledge in Learning and Processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Repetition, but not acoustic differentiation, facilitates pseudohomophone learning by children.Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development · 2022Article
- Article
- Order Matters! Influences of Linear Order on Linguistic Category Learning.Cognitive science · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite burgeoning evidence that listeners are highly sensitive to statistical distributions of speech cues, the mechanism underlying learning may not be purely statistical tracking. Decades of research in animal learning suggest that learning results from prediction and prediction error. Two artificial language learning experiments test two predictions that distinguish error-driven from purely statistical models; namely, cue competition - specifically, Kamin's (1968) 'blocking' effect (Experiment 1) - and the predictive structure of learning events (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, prior knowledge of an informative cue blocked learning of a second cue. This finding may help explain second language learners' difficulty in acquiring native-level perception of non-native speech cues. In Experiment 2, learning was better with a discriminative (cue-outcome) order compared to a non-discriminative (outcome-cue) order. Experiment 2 suggests that learning speech cues, including reversing effects of blocking, depends on (un)learning from prediction error and depends on the temporal order of auditory cues versus semantic outcomes. Together, these results show that (a) existing knowledge of acoustic cues can block later learning of new cues, and (b) speech sound acquisition depends on the predictive structure of learning events. When feedback from prediction error is available, this drives learners to ignore salient non-discriminative cues and effectively learn to use target cue dimensions. These findings may have considerable implications for the field of speech acquisition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.