Children typically produce high-frequency phonotactic sequences, such as the /st/ in “toaster,” more accurately than the lower frequency /mk/ in “tomcat.” This high-frequency advantage can be simulated experimentally with a statistical learning paradigm, and when 4-year-old children are familiarized with many examples of a sequence like /mk/, they generally produce it more accurately than if they are exposed to just a few examples. Here, we sought to expand our understanding of the high-frequency advantage, but surprisingly, we instead uncovered an exception. Twenty-nine children between 4 and 5 years of age completed a phonotactic statistical learning experiment, but they also completed a separate experiment focused on statistical learning of prosodic contours. The order of the experiments was randomized, with the phonotactic statistical learning experiment occurring first for half of the children. For the children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment first, the results were consistent with previous research and a high-frequency advantage. However, children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment second produced low-frequency sequences more accurately than high-frequency sequences. There is little precedent for the latter effect, but studies of multistream statistical learning may provide some context for unpacking and extending the result.

中文翻译：

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儿童对语音策略的统计学习可能会受到另一项统计学习任务的影响

儿童通常会产生高频趋音序列，例如“烤面包机”中的 /st/，比“tomcat”中的低频 /mk/ 更准确。这种高频优势可以通过统计学习范式进行实验模拟，当 4 岁的孩子熟悉像 /mk/ 这样的序列的许多例子时，他们通常会比仅接触一个序列更准确地产生它。几个例子。在这里，我们试图扩大对高频优势的理解，但令人惊讶的是，我们却发现了一个例外。29 名 4 至 5 岁的儿童完成了语音趋向统计学习实验，但他们还完成了另一项专注于韵律轮廓统计学习的单独实验。实验的顺序是随机的，一半的孩子首先进行语音统计学习实验。对于先完成语音定向学习实验的孩子来说，结果与之前的研究一致，具有高频优势。然而，第二次完成音位学习实验的孩子产生的低频序列比高频序列更准确。后一种效果几乎没有先例，但多流统计学习的研究可能为解包和扩展结果提供一些背景。