Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children decide what speech to tune into and learn from? We extend the idea that learners preferentially attend tostimuli at an intermediate level of complexity to the domain of spoken language. Preschoolers (2.5-6.5 years in Exp.1 and3.5-5.5 years in Exp. 2) watched two speakers alternate narrating pages of a textless picture book, before selecting whothey wanted to hear finish the story. We manipulated the complexity of the narrators speech, such that the SIMPLE speakerused earlier-acquired words than the COMPLEX speaker. In Experiment 1, both speakers introduced rare target wordsthat children were later tested on. While children learned an impressive number of them, the inclusion of these rare wordsmay have made both speech streams too complex for children to show a systematic preference for one over the other.In Experiment 2, we narrowed our age range, and amplified the contrast in complexity between the two speech streams.Preliminary results suggest that children discriminated between the two levels of complexity, systematically selecting thesimpler speaker to finish the story. These results suggest that preschoolers can track the relative complexity of differentlinguistic inputs, opening the possibility that they may actively direct their attention toward linguistic input that is moreappropriate for them.