Zipfian distributions facilitate children's learning of novel word-referent mappings.

The word-frequency distributions children hear during language learning are highly skewed (Zipfian). Previous studies suggest that such skewed environments confer a learnability advantage in tasks that require the learner to discover the units that have to be learned, as in word-segmentation or cross-situational learning. This facilitative effect has been attributed to contextual facilitation from high frequency items in learning lower frequency items, and to better learning under the increased predictability (lower entropy) of skewed distributions.

Zipfian Distributions in Child-Directed Speech.

Across languages, word frequency and rank follow a power law relation, forming a distribution known as the Zipfian distribution. There is growing experimental evidence that this well-studied phenomenon may be beneficial for language learning. However, most investigations of word distributions in natural language have focused on adult-to-adult speech: Zipf's law has not been thoroughly evaluated in child-directed speech (CDS) across languages.

The learnability consequences of Zipfian distributions in language.

While the languages of the world differ in many respects, they share certain commonalties, which can provide insight on our shared cognition. Here, we explore the learnability consequences of one of the striking commonalities between languages. Across languages, word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, showing a power law relation between a word's frequency and its rank.

Visual statistical learning is facilitated in Zipfian distributions.

Humans can extract co-occurrence regularities from their environment, and use them for learning. This statistical learning ability (SL) has been studied extensively as a way to explain how we learn the structure of our environment. These investigations have illustrated the impact of various distributional properties on learning.

Developmental Differences Between Children and Adults in the Use of Visual Cues for Segmentation.

Recent work asked if visual cues facilitate word segmentation in adults and infants (Thiessen, 2010). While adults showed better word segmentation when presented with a regular visual cue (consistent mapping between words and objects), infants did not. This difference was attributed to infants' lack of understanding that objects have labels.

Perception of Graphical Virtual Environments by Blind Users via Sensory Substitution.

Graphical virtual environments are currently far from accessible to blind users as their content is mostly visual. This is especially unfortunate as these environments hold great potential for this population for purposes such as safe orientation, education, and entertainment. Previous tools have increased accessibility but there is still a long way to go.