Evoked potential correlates of linguistic cross-situational associations in the absense of behavioral learning

LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA; KACZER LAURA; SEGURA ENRIQUE; ZANUTTO SILVANO; WAINSELBOIM ALEJANDRO

New Orleans

Congreso; 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychopshysiological Research; 2012

First language acquisition occurs by exposure to the linguistic context. Infants must infer word meanings by pairing specific aspects of their perceptual experience with particular segments of the concurrent linguistic input. This requires to statistically analyze cross-situational information (Saffran et al. 1996). Experimentally, subjects infer new noun and verbal meanings by cross-situational pairings of images and auditory pseudo-words, when given an explicit instruction to learn the new terms (Yu & Smith 2007; Lopes da Cunha et al 2010). In the present work we studied if new verbal meanings could be learned unintentionally in adults, i.e. in the absence of intention to learn.