ArticleLanguage, cognition and neuroscience2023
The acquisition of speech categories: Beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy.
Article in Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Speech Categorization Consistency Predicts Language and Reading Abilities in Korean School-Age Children.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Phonetic variability leads to gradient speech perception.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Changes in the Structure of Speech Categorization Across School Age Years: Children Become More Gradient and More Consistent.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Listeners rapidly adapt to current conditions: "Good-enough" adaptation in multitalker speech perception.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Article
- A pipeline for stochastic and controlled generation of realistic language input for simulating infant language acquisition.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Brain-Inspired Multisensory Learning: A Systematic Review of Neuroplasticity and Cognitive Outcomes in Adult Multicultural and Second Language Acquisition.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- The myth of categorical perception.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Review
- Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
An early achievement in language is carving a variable acoustic space into categories. The canonical story is that infants accomplish this by the second year, when only unsupervised learning is plausible. I challenge this view, synthesizing five lines of developmental, phonetic and computational work. First, unsupervised learning may be insufficient given the statistics of speech (including infant-directed). Second, evidence that infants "have" speech categories rests on tenuous methodological assumptions. Third, the fact that the ecology of the learning environment is unsupervised does not rule out more powerful error driven learning mechanisms. Fourth, several implicit supervisory signals are available to older infants. Finally, development is protracted through adolescence, enabling richer avenues for development. Infancy may be a time of organizing the auditory space, but true categorization only arises via complex developmental cascades later in life. This has implications for critical periods, second language acquisition, and our basic framing of speech perception.
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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.