Language Learning and Development

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl" two-year olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a boy and a girl separately spinning). However, two- and three-year-olds do not consistently show the opposite preference when hearing conjoined-subject intransitive sentences ("the boy and the girl are glorping")...

Children recruit verb syntax to guide verb interpretation. We asked whether 22-month-olds spontaneously encode information about a particular novel verb's syntactic properties through listening to sentences, retain this information in long-term memory over a filled delay, and retrieve it to guide interpretation upon hearing the same novel verb again. Children watched dialogues in which interlocutors discussed unseen events using a novel verb in transitive (e.g., "Anna blicked the baby") or intransitive sentences ("Anna blicked")...

The aim of the current study was to examine different aspects of procedural memory in young adults who varied with regard to their language abilities. We selected a sample of procedural memory tasks, each of which represented a unique type of procedural learning, and has been linked, at least partially, to the functionality of the corticostriatal system. The findings showed that variance in language abilities is associated with performance on different domains of procedural memory, including the motor domain (as shown in the pursuit rotor task), the cognitive domain (as shown in the weather prediction task), and the linguistic domain (as shown in the nonword repetition priming task)...

Across languages and event types (agentive and non-agentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion verbs. However, in the non-linguistic memory of children and adults, a goal bias shows up only for events involving intentional, goal-directed, action. Three experiments explored infants' non-linguistic representations of goals and sources in motion events...

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is something crucial about the presence of multiple talkers that is driving this performance. To determine whether or not acoustic variability in and of itself is beneficial in early word learning tasks like the switch task, we tested 14-month-old infants in a version of the switch task using acoustically variable auditory stimuli produced by a single speaker...

A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that infants of 6 to 9 months know the meanings of some common words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings. With a new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6-16 months, n=49) are presented with side-by-side video clips depicting various common early words, and one clip is named in a sentence, they look at the named video at above-chance rates. We demonstrate anew that infants understand common words by 6-9 months, and that performance increases substantially around 14 months...

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between vocabulary size and the speed and accuracy of lexical processing in preschoolers between the ages of 30-46 months using an automatic eye tracking task based on the looking-while-listening paradigm (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008) and mispronunciation paradigm (White & Morgan, 2008). Children's eye gaze patterns were tracked while they looked at two pictures (one familiar object, one unfamiliar object) on a computer screen and simultaneously heard one of three kinds of auditory stimuli: correct pronunciations of the familiar object's name, one-feature mispronunciations of the familiar object's name, or a nonword...

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, two-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"). But, they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adverbs might facilitate toddlers' verb learning in these sparse pronominal frames, if their semantic content directed toddlers' attention to aspects of the event that are relevant to the verb's meaning (e...

Examination of infant vocalization patterns across interactive and noninteractive contexts may facilitate better understanding of early communication development. In the current study, with 24 infant-parent dyads, infant volubility increased significantly when parent interaction ceased (presenting a "still face," or SF) after a period of normal interaction ("face-to-face," or FF). Infant volubility continued at the higher rate than in FF when the parent re-engaged ("reunion," or RE)...

F0-based acoustic measures were extracted from a brief, sentence-final target word spoken during structured play interactions between mothers and their 3- to 14-month-old infants, and were analyzed based on demographic variables and DSM-IV Axis-I clinical diagnoses and their common modifiers. F0 range (ΔF0) was negatively correlated with infant age and number of children. ΔF0 was significantly smaller in clinically depressed mothers and mothers diagnosed with depression in partial remission, relative to non-depressed mothers, mothers diagnosed with depression in full remission, and those diagnosed with depressive disorder not otherwise specified...

Joint attention between hearing children and their caregivers is typically achieved when the adult provides spoken, auditory linguistic input that relates to the child's current visual focus of attention. Deaf children interacting through sign language must learn to continually switch visual attention between people and objects in order to achieve the classic joint attention characteristic of young hearing children. The current study investigated the mechanisms used by sign language dyads to achieve joint attention within a single modality...

Handshape works differently in nouns vs. a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL), and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself (object handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled (handling handshapes) appear in both nouns and a particular type of verb, classifier predicates, in ASL. When used as nouns, object and handling handshapes are phonemic-that is, they are specified in dictionary entries and do not vary with grammatical context...

Number words are generally used to refer to the exact cardinal value of a set, but cognitive scientists disagree about their meanings. Although most psychological analyses presuppose that numbers have exact semantics (two means EXACTLY TWO), many linguistic accounts propose that numbers have lower-bounded semantics (AT LEAST TWO), and that speakers restrict their reference through a pragmatic inference (scalar implicature). We address this debate through studies of children who are in the process of acquiring the meanings of numbers...

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I mainly focus on the United States, which fares poorly on cross-national comparisons of literacy, with about 25-30% of the population exhibiting literacy skills that are low by standard metrics...

Probabilistically-cued co-occurrence relationships between word categories are common in natural languages but difficult to acquire. For example, in English, determiner-noun and auxiliary-verb dependencies both involve co-occurrence relationships, but determiner-noun relationships are more reliably marked by correlated distributional and phonological cues, and appear to be learned more readily. We tested whether experience with co-occurrence relationships that are more reliable promotes learning those that are less reliable using an artificial language paradigm...

Recent evidence shows that infants can learn words and referents by aggregating ambiguous information across situations to discern the underlying word-referent mappings. Here, we use an individual difference approach to understand the role of different kinds of attentional processes in this learning: 12-and 14-month-old infants participated in a cross-situational word-referent learning task in which the learning trials were ordered to create local novelty effects, effects that should not alter the statistical evidence for the underlying correspondences...

Gaining facility with spelling is an important part of becoming a good writer. Here we review recent work on how children learn to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Statistical learning plays an important role in this process. Thus, young children learn about some of the salient graphic characteristics of written texts and attempt to reproduce these characteristics in their own productions even before they use letters to represent phonemes. Later, children apply their statistical learning skills to links between phonemes and spellings, including those that are conditioned by context and morphology...

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning conditions, either in children's stories (semantically rich) or picture matching games (semantically sparse). Three main analyses were used to measure word learning: comprehension and production probes, phonetic accuracy, and speech motor stability...

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first language (Xhosa) to speakers of a foreign language (French). Thus, social preferences based on language are observed not only among children with limited exposure to cultural and linguistic variation but also among children living in a diverse linguistic environment...

In many languages, significant numbers of words are used in more than one grammatical category; English, in particular, has many words that can be used as both nouns and verbs. Such ambicategoricality potentially poses problems for children trying to learn the grammatical properties of words and has been used to argue against the logical possibility of learning grammatical categories from syntactic distribution alone. This article addresses how often English-learning children hear words used across categories, whether young language learners might be sensitive to perceptual cues that differentiate noun and verb uses of such words and how young speakers use ambicategorical words...