Mechanisms of spoken word recognition and grammatical category learning
In the spirit of providing an overview of two topics that have been central to my research for the past two decades, I will first discuss mechanisms of spoken word recognition and then switch to mechanisms relevant to grammatical category learning. Models of spoken word recognition incorporate a process of lexical competition at both the phonological and semantic levels. I’ll review work with adults and infants, highlighting behavioral and neural evidence of lexical competition, which enables the rapid on-line recognition of words and provides insights about lexical representations. Then I’ll transition to studies of statistical learning, first instantiated at a low level for segmenting words from fluent speech. I’ll provide evidence that a similar statistical learning mechanism operates at higher levels in both adults and children, allowing for the implicit assignment of auditory word-forms to grammatical categories.