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Some autistic children acquire foreign languages from exposure to screens. Such Unexpected Bilingualism (UB) is therefore not driven by social interaction; rather, language acquisition appears to rely on less socially mediated learning and other cognitive processes. We hypothesize that UB children may rely on other cues, such as acoustic cues, of the linguistic input. Previous research indicates enhanced pitch processing in some autistic children, often associated with language delays and difficulties in forming stable phonological categories due to sensitivity to subtle linguistic variations. We propose that repetitive screen-based input simplifies linguistic complexity, allowing focus on individual cues. This study hypothesizes that autistic UB children exhibit superior pitch discrimination compared to both autistic and non-autistic peers. From a sample of 46 autistic French-speaking children aged 9 to 16, 12 were considered as UB. These children, along with 45 non-autistic children, participated in a two-alternative forced-choice pitch discrimination task. They listened to pairs of pure tones, 50% of which differed by 3% (easy), 2% (medium), or 1% (hard). A stringent comparison of performance revealed that only the autistic UB group performed above chance for tone pairs that differed, across all conditions. This group demonstrated superior pitch discrimination relative to autistic and non-autistic peers. This study establishes the phenomenon of UB in autism and provides evidence for enhanced pitch discrimination in this group. Acute perception of auditory information, combined with repeated language content, may facilitate UB children's focus on phonetic features, and help acquire a language with no communicative support or motivation.
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Adults regularize variation when linguistic cues suggest low input reliability
Children regularize inconsistent probabilistic patterns in linguistic input, yet they also acquire and match probabilistic sociolinguistic variation. What factors in the language input contribute to whether children will regularize or match the probabilistic patterns they are exposed to? Here, we test the hypothesis that low input reliability facilitates regularization. As a first step, we asked adult participants to acquire a variable plural marking pattern from a written (Exp 1) and a spoken (Exp 2) artificial language under different conditions, where they were led to believe input was more, or less, reliable. In both experiments, input reliability was manipulated through both information about the speaker (e.g., whether the speaker was likely to make mistakes) and linguistic cues (e.g., typos or pronunciation errors). Results showed that adults regularized the written language more only when they were told the speaker would make mistakes and the plural variants resembled typos (Exp 1), whereas they regularized the spoken language more when the plural variants resembled pronunciation errors regardless of the speaker’s said reliability in the spoken language. We conclude that input reliability is an important factor that can modulate learners’ regularization of probabilistic linguistic input, and that linguistic cues may play a more critical role than top-down knowledge about the speaker. The current study lays down an important foundation for future work exploring whether children are able to incorporate input reliability cues when learning probabilistic linguistic variation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2043724
- PAR ID:
- 10391975
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2473-8689
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5293
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5293
