The impact of within-speaker acoustic variability on statistical word learning in second language learners of English

The current study investigates the role of within-speaker acoustic variability on statistical word learning in adult second language learners of English. The purpose of this study is to understand if within-speaker variability in novel word input impacts people’s word learning and creation of word representations. During the learning task, participants will complete a cross-situational word learning task in which they view four objects and hear one target word in either the multiple or single exemplar condition. This task is unsupervised to understand how word learning occurs in ambiguous contexts. In a subsequent recognition task, participants will hear four words: the target word that was also included in the word learning task and three distractors, which are minimal pairs of the target. They are asked to identify the target word. During this task, accuracy will be measured. Based on a previous experiment (Exp. 1), we expect participants to have higher learning and recognition accuracy for words learned in the single exemplar condition.