Of mice and men: Speech sound acquisition as discriminative learning from prediction error, not just statistical tracking

Despite burgeoning evidence that listeners are highly sensitive to statistical distributions of speech cues, the mechanism underlying learning may not be purely statistical tracking. Decades of research in animal learning suggest that learning results from prediction and prediction error. Two artificial language learning experiments test two predictions that distinguish error-driven from purely statistical models; namely, cue competition – specifically, Kamin’s (1968) ‘blocking’ effect (Experiment 1) – and the predictive structure of learning events (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, prior knowledge of an informative cue blocked learning of a second cue. This finding may help explain second language learners’ difficulty in acquiring native-level perception of non-native speech cues. In Experiment 2, learning was better with a discriminative (cue–outcome) order compared to a non-discriminative (outcome–cue) order. Experiment 2 suggests that learning speech cues, including reversing effects of blocking, depends on (un)learning from prediction error and depends on the temporal order of auditory cues versus semantic outcomes. Together, these results show that (a) existing knowledge of acoustic cues can block later learning of new cues, and (b) speech sound acquisition depends on the predictive structure of learning events. When feedback from prediction error is available, this drives learners to ignore salient non-discriminative cues and effectively learn to use target cue dimensions. These findings may have considerable implications for the field of speech acquisition.