Carolyn Quam - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals for this fellowship are: (1) to relate the candidate's existing research training in word learning and sound-category learning to a new linguistic domain, phonological-rule generalization;(2) to evaluate whether similar mechanisms support word learning and phonological-rule generalization, two linguistic domains that have been argued to be qualitatively distinct;in particular, to evaluate whether variability on a dimension irrelevant to the learning task facilitates learning analogously in the two domains. In the word- learning task, variability is introduced in the talkers'voices when infants are habituated to the word-object pairs. In the phonological-rule learning task, infants are familiarized to a language in which 3-syllable words obey a consonant-voicing rule (e.g., the 1st 2 syllables must have the same voicing), and variability is introduced in the vowels. To investigate the mechanism by which variability facilitates learning in the two domains, the distributional structure of the variability in each domain is also manipulated;(3) to develop new research skills for the candidate by exposing her to new language-acquisition topics, distributional learning and phonological-rule learning, and new methodologies, artificial-language methods and the head-turn preference procedure;and (4) to supplement the candidate's research training in these new topics and methods with relevant institutional training at the University of Arizona, both through pertinent courses in speech perception, statistics, and ethics, and active participation in lab meetings, seminars, and colloquia across Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. These goals for the fellowship training, by broadening the candidate's knowledge of language acquisition, expanding her expertise to new methods and theoretical questions, and furthering her publication record, will support her long-term career goals of establishing her own research laboratory and securing a tenure-track professorship at a research university. The proposed research has implications for speech therapy. Current speech therapy methods often fail to fully yield of out-of-clinic generalization, and lack of variability in the speech input provided during therapy may be one limiting factor. Identifying what types of noncriterial variability enhance attention to phonological contrasts and phonological regularities could greatly improve the efficacy of speech therapy. In particular, variability on an irrelevant but salient dimension could potentially be used to draw children's attention to the relevant dimension, improving learning. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Current speech therapy methods often fail to fully yield of out-of-clinic generalization, and lack of variability in the speech input provided during therapy may be one limiting factor. Identifying what types of noncriterial variability enhance attention to phonological contrasts and phonological regularities could greatly improve the efficacy of speech therapy. In particular, variability on an irrelevant but salient dimension could potentially be used to draw children's attention to the relevant dimension, improving learning.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals for this fellowship are: (1) to relate the candidate's existing research training in word learning and sound-category learning to a new linguistic domain, phonological-rule generalization; (2) to evaluate whether similar mechanisms support word learning and phonological-rule generalization, two linguistic domains that have been argued to be qualitatively distinct; in particular, to evaluate whether variability on a dimension irrelevant to the learning task facilitates learning analogously in the two domains. In the word- learning task, variability is introduced in the talkers' voices when infants are habituated to the word-object pairs. In the phonological-rule learning task, infants are familiarized to a language in which 3-syllable words obey a consonant-voicing rule (e.g., the 1st 2 syllables must have the same voicing), and variability is introduced in the vowels. To investigate the mechanism by which variability facilitates learning in the two domains, the distributional structure of the variability in each domain is also manipulated; (3) to develop new research skills for the candidate by exposing her to new language-acquisition topics, distributional learning and phonological-rule learning, and new methodologies, artificial-language methods and the head-turn preference procedure; and (4) to supplement the candidate's research training in these new topics and methods with relevant institutional training at the University of Arizona, both through pertinent courses in speech perception, statistics, and ethics, and active participation in lab meetings, seminars, and colloquia across Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. These goals for the fellowship training, by broadening the candidate's knowledge of language acquisition, expanding her expertise to new methods and theoretical questions, and furthering her publication record, will support her long-term career goals of establishing her own research laboratory and securing a tenure-track professorship at a research university. The proposed research has implications for speech therapy. Current speech therapy methods often fail to fully yield of out-of-clinic generalization, and lack of variability in the speech input provided during therapy may be one limiting factor. Identifying what types of noncriterial variability enhance attention to phonological contrasts and phonological regularities could greatly improve the efficacy of speech therapy. In particular, variability on an irrelevant but salient dimension could potentially be used to draw children's attention to the relevant dimension, improving learning.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this application is to link language-learning difficulties seen in two populations: children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and adults learning a second language (L2). Through the applicant's research on typical language development, she has developed a novel perspective about what makes infants precocious language learners, which she is using to make novel predictions about learning difficulties in childhood SLI and adult L2 learning. The applicant's current work with LouAnn Gerken (Quam, Knight, & Gerken, under review) and other evidence suggests that infants are surprisingly willing to attend to new acoustic dimensions in word learning. She proposes that this open-mindedness might make infants particularly good at learning new linguistic structure (see also Newport, 1991). She has identified two factors that seem to contribute to open-mindedness: slow development of explicit-learning mechanisms (Jones & Herbert, 2006; Richmond & Nelson, 2007)-which biases infants to rely on implicit learning-and limited knowledge of which dimensions are relevant for differentiating sounds in the native language. These insights have important implications for two groups who struggle to learn new linguistic structure: adult L2 learners and children with SLI. For adult L2 learners, we predict that blocking access to both explicit learning and native-language biases will facilitate learning of L2 categories. For typically developing 4- and 5-year-olds learning artificial sound categories, we predict a similar result. Both groups have intact implicit-learning abilities which are often overshadowed by their strong explicit skills, so blocking access to explicit skills should facilitae their implicit learning. However, predictions diverge for children with SLI, who have been argued to have weak implicit- learning skills (Lum, Conti-Ramsden, Page, & Ullman, 2011). Thus, these children should struggle to learn categories that are best learned implicitly. The mentored-phase training in language disorders at the University of Arizona will capitalize on an existing collaborative relationship between mentor Dr. Elena Plante (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; SLHS) and co-mentor Dr. LouAnn Gerken (Psychology) to provide the applicant with coursework and research skills pertinent to SLI. The mentored research will be advised by a team of mentors and advisors with the requisite expertise to train the applicant in SLI (Dr. Plante), connections between typical development and SLI (Drs. Gerken and Plante) implicit/explicit category learning (Dr. Todd Maddox, UT Austin), and language-specific skills and biases in sound-category learning (Dr. Lotto).