Word Learning Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

I demonstrate the application of hierarchical regression modeling, a state-of-the-art technique for statistical inference, to language research. First, a stable sociolinguistic variable in Philadelphia (Labov, 2001) is reconsidered, with... more

I demonstrate the application of hierarchical regression modeling, a state-of-the-art technique for statistical inference, to language research. First, a stable sociolinguistic variable in Philadelphia (Labov, 2001) is reconsidered, with attention paid to the treatment of collinearities among socioeconomic predictors. I then demonstrate the use of hierarchical models to account for the random sampling of subjects and items in an experimental setting, using data from a study of word-learning in the face of tonal variation (Quam and Swingley ...

The current study examines how focusing children’s attention immediately after fast mapping improves their ability to retain novel names. Previous research suggests that young children can only retain novel names presented via referent... more

The current study examines how focusing children’s attention immediately after fast mapping improves their ability to retain novel names. Previous research suggests that young children can only retain novel names presented via referent selection if ostensive naming is provided and that such explicit naming works by increasing children’s attention to the target and decreasing their attention to the competitor objects (Horst and Samuelson, 2008). This explanation of the function of ostensive naming after referent selection trials was tested by drawing 24-month-old children’s attention to the target either by illuminating the target, covering the competitors, or both. A control group was given a social pragmatic cue (pointing). Children given social pragmatic cue support did not demonstrate retention. However, children demonstrated retention if the target object was illuminated, and also when it was illuminated and the competitors simultaneously dampened. This suggests that drawing children’s attention to the target object in a manner that helps focus children’s attention is critical for word learning via referent selection. Directing attention away from competitors while also directing attention toward a target also aids in the retention of novel words.

Metacognition refers to an individual's knowledge, control and awareness of his/her learning processes. An important goal of education is to develop students as metacognitive, life-long learners. However, developing students'... more

Metacognition refers to an individual's knowledge, control and awareness of his/her learning processes. An important goal of education is to develop students as metacognitive, life-long learners. However, developing students' metacognition and evaluating whether classrooms are oriented to the development of students' metacognition are difficult and often time-consuming tasks. Further, no instruments that measure key dimensions related to classroom factors that specifically influence the development of students' metacognition have been available. This article describes the conceptualisation, design, and validation of an instrument for evaluating the metacognitive orientation of science classroom learning environments. The metacognitive orientation of a learning environment is the extent to which that environment supports the development and enhancement of students' metacognition. Social constructivism was the guiding referent informing the instrument's orientation and development. This instrument measures students' perceptions of the extent to which certain psychosocial dimensions, evident in learning environments where interventions have resulted in enhanced student metacognition, are evident in their science classrooms. Findings from the use of this instrument complement what is already known from research studies to be generally the case in relation to science classrooms' metacognitive orientation.

This paper examines whether there is an asymmetry in production and perception of the stop-fricative contrast by Dutch learning children. The development of stops and fricatives in both word-initial and post-vocalic position is studied.... more

This paper examines whether there is an asymmetry in production and perception of the stop-fricative contrast by Dutch learning children. The development of stops and fricatives in both word-initial and post-vocalic position is studied. To investigate the acquisition of stops and fricatives in production, longitudinal spontaneous speech data of six Dutch one- to three-year-olds was analyzed. To test infants’ perception of this contrast, a series of word-learning experiments using the Switch paradigm was conducted with 62 Dutch 14-month-olds. The data show similar phonological asymmetries: in both perception and production infants treat stops differently from fricatives. Based on this phonological asymmetry we argue that (a) children use the same lexical representations for perception and production, suggesting that development in perception and production go hand in hand, that (b) early lexical representations are not specified with respect to all features, and that (c) specification does not occur in all prosodic positions at the same time

""[Picture Vocabulary Test - Comprehension] This is the first psychometric tool enabling the measurement of vocabulary size in monolingual Polish children aged 2 to 6 years. OTSR assesses understanding of nouns, verbs and adjectives in a... more

""[Picture Vocabulary Test - Comprehension]
This is the first psychometric tool enabling the measurement of vocabulary size in monolingual Polish children aged 2 to 6 years. OTSR assesses understanding of nouns, verbs and adjectives in a picture choice task. The test was normed on a representative sample of about 2000 children.
OTSR is accompanied by the manual including extensive theoretical rationale for the method of test construction, results of validity studies, instruction and norms in half-year intervals (separate for boys and girls) for general result as well as in three sub-scales for each of the word classes (nouns, verbs and adjectives).""

Se analizan las tendencias en la investigacion basica sobre psicologia del aprendizaje y su impacto, con base en los trabajos publicados en las principales revistas de psicologia en espanol: Revista Latinoamericana de Psicologia (RLP),... more

Se analizan las tendencias en la investigacion basica sobre psicologia del aprendizaje y su impacto, con base en los trabajos publicados en las principales revistas de psicologia en espanol: Revista Latinoamericana de Psicologia (RLP), Psicothema (PT), Revista Mexicana de Psicologia (RMP), y Revista Interamericana de Psicologia (RIP). Las tres primeras estan ?indexadas? por el Institute for Scientific Information (ISS), y la cuarta lo estuvo hasta hace pocos anos. Los porcentajes de articulos publicados sobre investigacion basica en aprendizaje son los siguientes: RLP (40%), PT (38.3%), RIP (15%), y RMP (6.7%). Los paises con mayor numero de investigaciones publicadas son Espana, Mexico, Argentina y Colombia. La decada mas productiva fue la mas reciente, 1990-1999. Las especies mas estudiadas han sido ratas, humanos y palomas. Los tipos de aprendizaje fueron discriminacion de estimulos, condicionamiento instrumental aversivo, condicionamiento clasico, y condicionamiento instrumental...

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants... more

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence.

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the... more

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words. The current paper reviews this study and further examines the effect of contextual repetition on children's word learning in both shared storybook reading and other situations, including fast mapping by mutual exclusivity. The studies reviewed here suggest that the same cognitive mechanisms support word learning in a variety of situations. Both practical considerations for experimental design and directions for future research are discussed.

The paper investigates lexical development of L2 learners of English using written responses to Skills for Life writing examinations across five proficiency levels. In this way, the paper also explores the validity of Skills for Life... more

The paper investigates lexical development of L2 learners of English using written responses to Skills for Life writing examinations across five proficiency levels. In this way, the paper also explores the validity of Skills for Life Writing examinations from a lexical perspective by ascertaining how well they differentiate between language proficiency levels. This is done by analysing the use of individual words and lexical bundles (extended collocations) in candidates’ written responses to examination questions. Vocabulary frequency measures have been found to be insufficiently robust for capturing the differences between proficiency levels (see Read & Nation 2006, Schmitt 2005), possibly because single-word frequencies are not the only measure of lexical mastery. Therefore, an investigation of multi-word units, such as collocations and lexical bundles, has been called for.

A growing body of electronic storybooks, with different multimedia additions such as animation, background music and sound effects, has become available in online stores for an international community. The current study was designed to... more

A growing body of electronic storybooks, with different multimedia additions such as animation, background music and sound effects, has become available in online stores for an international community. The current study was designed to disentangle the effects of multimedia features that are rather common: animation on the one hand, music and sound effects on the other. Furthermore, we aimed to assess whether multimedia-enhanced stories that have been shown to facilitate word learning in other samples (Takacs, Swart & Bus, 2015) are similarly effective for Turkish children. A sample of 99 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: (1) animated stories with background music and sounds, (2) animated stories without background music and sounds, (3) stories with static illustrations and background music and sounds, (4) stories with static illustrations without background music and sounds and (5) a control group who did not listen to the stories. In the intervention conditions, two electronic storybooks were each presented twice. Preliminary results show cognitive overload from the electronic books. In contrast to previous studies, animated illustrations were not helpful in acquiring new word meanings and children gained more vocabulary in the conditions without music or sound. In particular, background music and sounds seem to interfere with Turkish children’s learning. Possible explanations are discussed.

El objetivo de este trabajo fue estudiar la influencia de las lenguas del bilingüe (L1 y L2) en el aprendizaje de vocabulario en L3. En particular, se investigó si aprender nuevo vocabulario en L3 a partir de la lengua dominante de los... more

El objetivo de este trabajo fue estudiar la influencia de las lenguas del bilingüe (L1 y L2) en el aprendizaje de vocabulario en L3. En particular, se investigó si aprender nuevo vocabulario en L3 a partir de la lengua dominante de los participantes (L1) resulta más fácil que aprenderlo a partir de la lengua no dominante (L2). Para evaluar el efecto de la lengua dominante en el aprendizaje de una L3, se realizó un estudio donde un grupo de 18 participantes bilingües tardíos no balanceados aprendieron por vía auditiva 60 palabras en una nueva lengua (eslovaco) a partir de su lengua dominante (español) y 60 palabras a partir de su lengua no dominante (inglés). Los resultados mostraron un progreso significativo en el aprendizaje de vocabulario de la L3 a lo largo de las dos primeras sesiones de aprendizaje. Sin embargo, no se observó un efecto de la lengua dominante, es decir, los participantes fueron capaces de aprender correctamente las palabras en eslovaco tanto a partir del español como del inglés. Los resultados no corroboran la hipótesis de la dominancia relativa de la lengua materna (L1) como un factor relevante en el aprendizaje de la L3 (Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes, 2012). Se discuten estos resultados tanto en función de la organización del lexicón mental como en función de la experiencia de los participantes con el aprendizaje de contenido a partir de su L2 y el tamaño de su vocabulario en esta lengua en comparación con la L1.

This paper proposes an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words – words used to indicate observable situations, events, objects, or characteristics. Building on the education of attention model of learning, utterances... more

This paper proposes an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words – words used to indicate observable situations, events, objects, or characteristics. Building on the education of attention model of learning, utterances of concrete words are defined as attentional actions: a repeatable form of behaviour performed by a person to indicate (i.e. point out) a particular aspect of the current situation to someone in order to achieve something. Based on recent empirical evidence on categorical colour perception, attentional actions are proposed to constrain the ongoing phenotypic reorganisation of persons into task-specific devices. The paper ends by situating the proposed account in a wider theoretical perspective on language. This paper serves two purposes: first, it undermines the scope objection against the ecological-enactive approach, and second, it provides a novel explanation for recent empirical evidence with respect to the role of language in categorical colour perception.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the... more

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

Flexible induction is the adaptation of probabilistic inferences to changing problems. Young children's flexibility was tested in a word-learning task. Children 3 to 6 years old were told 3 novel words for each of several novel objects.... more

Flexible induction is the adaptation of probabilistic inferences to changing problems. Young children's flexibility was tested in a word-learning task. Children 3 to 6 years old were told 3 novel words for each of several novel objects. Children generalized each word to other objects with the same body shape, the same material, or the same part as the first object. Each word was preceded by a different predicate (i.e., "looks like a ...," "is made of ...," or "has a ...") that implies a different attribute (shape, material, or part, respectively). Three-year-olds showed limited use of predicates to infer word meanings, and they used predicates from previous trials to infer the meanings of later words. 4- to 6-year-olds used predicate cues more consistently and made inferences that were implied by the most recent predicate cue. Notably, 3-year-olds performed near ceiling in a control task that eliminated the need to use probabilistic inductive cues (Experiment 3). The results suggest that flexibility develops as a function of (a) sensitivity to between-problem variability and indeterminacy and (b) ability to decontextualize the most recent verbal cue to guide of inductive inferences.

Despite tremendous cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in linguistic input, early vocabularies are dominated by nouns. One explanation for this pattern appeals to the conceptual capacity of the learner—nouns predominate because... more

Despite tremendous cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in linguistic input, early vocabularies are dominated by nouns. One explanation for this pattern appeals to the conceptual capacity of the learner—nouns predominate because the concepts to which they refer are somehow simpler or more accessible to young learners than the concepts to which verbs refer. Evidence for this viewpoint has come primarily from infants and toddlers. Another explanation appeals to the linguistic requirements underlying word learning—nouns predominate because their acquisition is well-supported by observation, while verbs often depend on additional linguistic information which early word learners are not yet able to utilize. Evidence for this viewpoint has thus far come primarily from adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP). To bridge this gap, we modified the HSP task to accommodate children. Although children's approach to this task differed markedly from that of adults, their patterns of performance were strikingly similar. Given observation alone, 7-year-olds—like adults—identified nouns more successfully than verbs. When observation was supplemented with linguistic information, 7-year-olds successfully recruited this information to identify verbs. This outcome represents the first empirical demonstration that young children's noun advantage may be attributable, at least in part, to the distinct linguistic requirements underlying the acquisition of nouns and verbs.

The acquisition of vocabulary represents a key phenomenon in language acquisition, but is still poorly understood. Recently, the working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) has been adapted to account for vocabulary acquisition (e.g.,... more

The acquisition of vocabulary represents a key phenomenon in language acquisition, but is still poorly understood. Recently, the working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) has been adapted to account for vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). It is claimed that the phonological store, one of the components of working memory, offers a critical mechanism for learning new words. However, one of the theoretical weaknesses of this approach is that no account is given for the mechanisms and representations used in long-term memory learning. This paper presents a computer model combining the EPAM/chunking approach (Feigenbaum & Simon, 1984) with the working memory approach. Phonemic learning is simulated as the elaboration of a discrimination net. Naturalistic input, consisting of utterances from nine mothers interacting with their child, is used during the learning phase. Simulations show that the model can account reasonably well for the nonword repetition task described by Gathercole and Baddeley (1989), a task often presented as a powerful diagnostic of vocabulary learning.

The present study aimed to identify predictors of one aspect of sign language acquisition, sign learning, in hearing nonsigners. Candidate predictors were selected based on the theory that the observed relationship between phonological... more

The present study aimed to identify predictors of one aspect of sign language acquisition, sign learning, in hearing nonsigners. Candidate predictors were selected based on the theory that the observed relationship between phonological short-term memory and L2 lexical learning is due in part to common perceptual-motor processes. Hearing nonsigning adults completed a sign learning task, three assessments of short-term memory for movements (movement STM)- two of which used sign-like stimuli-and two visuospatial STM tasks. The final sample included 103 adults, ranging between 18 and 33 years of age. All predictors were moderately to strongly correlated with the sign learning task and to each other. A series of regression analyses revealed that both movement and visuospatial STM uniquely contributed to the prediction of sign learning. These results suggest that perceptual-motor processes play a significant role in sign learning and raise questions about the role of phonological processing.