Claire Delle Luche | University of Essex (original) (raw)

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Papers by Claire Delle Luche

Infant Behavior and Development, 2015

The Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm provides a sensitive measure of a child's online wor... more The Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm provides a sensitive measure of a child's online word comprehension. To complement existing recommendations , the present study evaluates the impact of experimental noise generated by two aspects of the visual stimuli on the robustness of familiar word recognition with and without mispronunciations: the presence of a central fixation point and the level of visual noise in the pictures (as measured by luminance saliency). Twenty-monthold infants were presented with a classic word recognition IPL procedure in 3 conditions: without a fixation stimulus (No Fixation -noisiest condition), with a fixation stimulus before trial onset (Fixation, intermediate), and with a fixation stimulus, a neutral background and equally salient images (Fixation Plus -least noisy). Data were systematically analyzed considering a range of data selection criteria and dependent variables (proportion of looking time towards the target, longest look, and time-course analysis). Critically, the expected pronunciation and naming interaction was only found in the Fixation Plus condition. We discuss the impact of data selection criteria and the dependent variable choice on the modulation of these effects across the different conditions.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2014

Following the proposal by that consonants are more important in constraining lexical access than ... more Following the proposal by that consonants are more important in constraining lexical access than vowels, demonstrated in a visual priming experiment that primes sharing consonants (jalu-JOLI) facilitate lexical access while primes sharing vowels do not (vobi-JOLI). The present study explores if this asymmetry can be extended to the auditory modality and whether language input plays a critical role as developmental studies suggest. Our experiments tested French and English as target languages and showed that consonantal information facilitated lexical decision to a greater extent than vocalic information, suggesting that the consonant advantage is independent of the language's distributional properties. However, vowels are also facilitatory, in specific cases, with iambic English CVCV or French CVCV words. This effect is related to the preservation of the rhyme between the prime and the target (here, the final vowel), suggesting that the rhyme, in addition to consonant information and consonant skeleton information is an important unit in auditory phonological priming and spoken word recognition.

Journal of Child Language, 2014

Journal of Child Language, 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract\_S0305000913000287

Developmental Science, 2014

A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that infants understand the meaning of spoken words f... more A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that infants understand the meaning of spoken words from as early as 6 months. Yet little is known about their ability to do so in the absence of any visual referent, which would offer diagnostic evidence for an adult-like, symbolic interpretation of words and their use in language mediated thought. We used the head-turn preference procedure to examine whether infants can generate implicit meanings from word forms alone as early as 18 months of age, and whether they are sensitive to meaningful relationships between words. In one condition, toddlers were presented with lists of words taken from the same taxonomic category (e.g. animals or body parts). In a second condition, words taken from two other categories (e.g. clothes and food items) were interleaved within the same list. Listening times were found to be longer in the related-category condition than in the mixed-category condition, suggesting that infants extract the meaning of spoken words and are sensitive to the semantic relatedness between these words. Our results show that infants have begun to construct the rudiments of a semantic system based on taxonomic relations even before they enter a period of accelerated vocabulary growth.

Cognition, 2012

The recognition of familiar words was evaluated in 20-month-old children raised in a rhotic accen... more The recognition of familiar words was evaluated in 20-month-old children raised in a rhotic accent environment to parents that had either rhotic or non-rhotic accents. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task children were presented with familiar objects (e.g. 'bird') named in their rhotic or non-rhotic form. Children were only able to identify familiar words pronounced in a rhotic accent, irrespective of their parents' accent. This suggests that it is the local community rather than parental input that determines accent preference in the early stages of acquisition. Consequences for the architecture of the early lexicon and for models of word learning are discussed.

Accessibility and givenness hierarchies 1,3,4 claim that referential expressions are ranked in a ... more Accessibility and givenness hierarchies 1,3,4 claim that referential expressions are ranked in a hierarchy and that their form signals the accessibility of the referred entity in the discourse. The less informative and more attenuated a referring expression is, the higher it is on this hierarchy. Pronouns are high on the hierarchy because they are short and semantically uninformative, whereas complex NPs are lower, being more informative and less attenuated.

assume that the form of anaphoric expressions signals the relative saliency of the antecedent. We... more assume that the form of anaphoric expressions signals the relative saliency of the antecedent. We argue that the form of relative pronouns in relative clauses has a similar function and therefore influences attachment preferences. We conducted two questionnaire experiments in which we investigated whether attachment preferences for ambiguous relative clauses are affected by the type of relative pronoun that is used. Experiment 1 showed a difference in attachment preference between qui and lequel, indicating that the form of the relative pronoun affects attachment preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difference observed in Experiment 1 is not due to differences in informativity between qui and lequel, suggesting that instead, it is due to a difference in markedness (qui is more frequent and shorter).

Cognitive Science, 2006

We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences... more We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne circles) that constitutes a semantic representation, these concepts can also be expressed syntactically in the form of algebraic formulas. We hypothesized that the quantified sentences have an abstract underlying representation common to the formulas and their associated sets of diagrams (models). We derived 9 predictions (3 semantic, 2 pragmatic, and 4 mixed) regarding people's assessment of how well each of the 5 diagrams expresses the meaning of each of the quantified sentences. We report the results from 3 experiments using Gergonne's (1817) circles or an adaptation of Leibniz (1903) lines as external representations and show them to support the predictions. etc.), classical Aristotelian quantifiers (all, some, and no), which are not strongly context dependent and whose meanings could be assumed to be easy to investigate, have not received the attention they deserve. Of course, there have been many studies of reasoning with quantifiers, for example, in syllogistic reasoning, but these generally take the meaning of quantifiers for granted and aim to explain the overall process leading to the production or the evaluation of conclusions. Unlike these studies of reasoning, in this work, we aimed to directly investigate the way quantified sentences are understood. The work is inspired by a detailed analysis of the system of circle diagrams that is familiar to most people from their early mathematics classes.