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

Previous studies have suggested that children possess cognitive representations of multi-word units (MWUs) and that MWUs can facilitate the acquisition of smaller units contained within them. We propose that the formation of MWU... more

Previous studies have suggested that children possess cognitive representations of multi-word units (MWUs) and that MWUs can facilitate the acquisition of smaller units contained within them. We propose that the formation of MWU representations precedes and facilitates the formation of single-word representations in children. Using different computational methods, we extract MWUs from two large corpora of English childdirected speech. In subsequent regression analyses, we use age of first production of individual words as the dependent and the number of MWUs within which each word appears as an independent variable. We find that early-learned words appear within many MWUs – an effect which is neither reducible to frequency or other common co-variates, nor to the number of context words contained in the MWUs. Our findings support accounts wherein children acquire linguistic patterns of varying sizes, moving gradually from the discovery of MWUs to the acquisition of small-grained ling...

We briefly review the considerable evidence for a common ordering mechanism underlying both immediate serial recall (ISR) tasks (e.g. digit span, non-word repetition) and the learning of phonological word forms. In addition, we discuss... more

We briefly review the considerable evidence for a common ordering mechanism underlying both immediate serial recall (ISR) tasks (e.g. digit span, non-word repetition) and the learning of phonological word forms. In addition, we discuss how recent work on the Hebb repetition effect is consistent with the idea that learning in this task is itself a laboratory analogue of the sequence-learning component of phonological word-form learning. In this light, we present a unifying modelling framework that seeks to account for ISR and Hebb repetition effects, while being extensible to word-form learning. Because word-form learning is performed in the service of later word recognition, our modelling framework also subsumes a mechanism for word recognition from continuous speech. Simulations of a computational implementation of the modelling framework are presented and are shown to be in accordance with data from the Hebb repetition paradigm.

Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt ‘give it’). The current study tests whether lexicons containing tri-segmental (CCC) vowelless words are more... more

Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt ‘give it’). The current study tests whether lexicons containing tri-segmental (CCC) vowelless words are more difficult to acquire than lexicons not containing vowelless words by adult English speakers from brief auditory exposure. The role of acoustic-phonetic form on learning these typologically rare word forms is also explored: In Experiment 1, participants were trained on words produced in either only Clear speech or Casual speech productions of words; Experiment 2 trained participants on lexical items produced in both speech styles. Listeners were able to learn both vowelless and voweled lexicons equally well when speaking style was consistent for participants, but learning was lower for vowelless lexicons when training consisted of variable acoustic-phonetic forms. In both experiments, responses to a post-training wordlikeness ratings task containing novel items revealed that exposure to a vowelless lexicon leads participants to accept new vowelless words as acceptable lexical forms. These results demonstrate that one of the typologically rarest types of lexical forms - words without vowels - can be rapidly acquired by naive adult listeners. Yet, acoustic-phonetic variation modulates learning.

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been repeatedly linked to the developmental trajectory of vocabulary acquisition in young children. However, the nature of this relationship remains underspecified. In particular, despite an extensive... more

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been repeatedly linked to the developmental trajectory of vocabulary acquisition in young children. However, the nature of this relationship remains underspecified. In particular, despite an extensive literature documenting young children's reliance on a host of skills and strategies to learn new words, little attention has been paid to whether and how these skills relate to measures of SES and vocabulary acquisition. To evaluate these relationships, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, 205 2.5‐ to 3.5‐year‐old children from widely varying socioeconomic backgrounds were tested on a broad range of word‐learning skills that tap their ability to resolve cases of ambiguous reference and to extend words appropriately. Children's executive functioning and phonological memory skills were also assessed. In Study 2, 77 of those children returned for a follow‐up session several months later, at which time two additional measures of vocabulary were obtai...

A basic question that arises with respect to early bilingual comprehension is whether, as in production, bilingual infants understand words from two languages that have the same meaning (translation equivalents). This study addresses this... more

A basic question that arises with respect to early bilingual comprehension is whether, as in production, bilingual infants understand words from two languages that have the same meaning (translation equivalents). This study addresses this question using CDI-data from 31 children growing up bilingual in French and Dutch. Raters report that 13-month-old bilingual infants all understand translation equivalents; however, the extent to which children understand translation equivalents is marked by considerable interindividual variability. This understanding is related to how many meanings children understand: the more advanced infants’ comprehension skills are, the more meanings they know in two languages rather than just one.

256-channel ERPs were recorded as subjects made lexical decisions to words (targets) presented on a computer screen. Targets were preceded by single words (primes). Primetarget pairs were closely related, remotely related, or unrelated.... more

256-channel ERPs were recorded as subjects made lexical decisions to words (targets) presented on a computer screen. Targets were preceded by single words (primes). Primetarget pairs were closely related, remotely related, or unrelated. In Task 1, In half the blocks, the prime was presented below the threshold for awareness (using pattern masks). In the other blocks, the prime was unmasked.

The present study examines desirable difficulties in contextual word learning (CWL). We had two main questions. First, we asked whether a series of moderately informative contexts would promote greater long-term retention than a series of... more

The present study examines desirable difficulties in contextual word learning (CWL). We had two main questions. First, we asked whether a series of moderately informative contexts would promote greater long-term retention than a series of maximally informative contexts. Second, we asked whether systematic variability of constraint (i.e., scaffolding) would provide additional benefits. Adult learners were exposed to very rare English words in four single-sentence contexts. During training, each word was assigned to one of five conditions: AllHigh (4 high- constraint contexts), AllMedium (4 medium-constraint contexts), Scaffolded (1 high-, 2 medium- , and 1 low-constraint context), Ascending (1 low-, 2 medium-, and 1 high-constraint context), or Untrained. We used generalized linear mixed modeling (GLMM) to predict accuracy on a multiple-choice synonym test. The test was administered at pretest (prior to training), immediately after training, and after a delay of 6-8 days. Results showed stronger gains on the immediate post-test for words in the AllHigh versus the AllMedium condition, but less forgetting in the AllMedium condition. Scaffolded contexts also resulted in less forgetting; moreover, there was no difference in initial learning from Scaffolded versus AllHigh contexts. Overall, these findings suggest that scaffolding of constraint leads to robust CWL.

Intraperitoneal administration of the mycotoxin penitrem A 30 min before a training session in passive avoidance task, impaired performance of rats subjected to a test-session 24 h after. This effect was not antagonised by pretraining... more

Intraperitoneal administration of the mycotoxin penitrem A 30 min before a training session in passive avoidance task, impaired performance of rats subjected to a test-session 24 h after. This effect was not antagonised by pretraining administration of physostigmine or bicuculline. Administration of penitrem A 20 min before a training session or 30 min before a test-session did not impair performance.

Phonological forms often express many different morphological functions. Learning these functions is quite challenging. How do learners accomplish this? Linguistic studies often assume that learning involves co-occurrence of cues and... more

Phonological forms often express many different morphological functions. Learning these functions is quite challenging. How do learners accomplish this? Linguistic studies often assume that learning involves co-occurrence of cues and outcomes –contiguity–, but research shows that mere contiguity cannot explain learning effects (Nixon, 2020, Ramscar et al., 2010). Error-driven learning theories (Rescorla and Wagner, 1972) instead assume learning to be contingency-based: Cues predict outcomes, and learning is viewed as a continuous process of adjusting predictions on the basis of errors. Cues compete with each other to predict outcomes. This cue competition drives learning. One effect of cue competition is unlearning – a cue losing its association to an outcome –, which has not yet been investigated empirically in morphophonological learning. This paper reports an artificial language learning experiment, as well as computational simulations, in which we investigated unlearning in morp...

Early childhood is a group of individuals who desperately need education and mentoring that are good for their future. Early childhood has different characteristics with adults, as well as their learning process. Early childhood requires... more

Early childhood is a group of individuals who desperately need education and mentoring that are good for their future. Early childhood has different characteristics with adults, as well as their learning process. Early childhood requires a fun learning process so that the process of learning early childhood does not get bored quickly. Many ways can be done to help children in the learning process. The most fun learning process for early childhood is by playing. Besides they can get useful lessons, through playing early childhood able to socialize well through playing. linguistic verbal intelligence is an intelligence that must be possessed by a child, the increase in verbal linguistics of children must be taught as early as possible so they have good verbal linguistics. There are many ways that can be used to improve the linguistic verbal intelligence of children, one of them is the word carriage game. This game is very easy and inexpensive, besides it can be used anywhere, this gam...

Shared book reading favors incidental learning of vocabulary; however, studies indicate that the previous vocabulary level of the child interferes with learning. The aim of this study was to compare the learning relations between... more

Shared book reading favors incidental learning of vocabulary; however, studies indicate that the previous vocabulary level of the child interferes with learning. The aim of this study was to compare the learning relations between pseudowords and figures of children aged 3 and 7 years in a shared book reading situation and to investigate the possible occurrence of the Matthew Effect. A book with four pseudowords developed for this study was read three consecutive times to 10 children of each age group. Matching-to-sample, exclusion, naming, and description of the use probes were applied immediately after the reading and one week later. No significant differences were found between the performances of both groups, except for the exclusion probes, without incidence of the Matthew Effect. Learning words is a continuous process that involves frequency and contexts of exposure to the words.

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a... more

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered.

All normally developing babies learn to speak. For most adults, however, it is hard to learn a new language, even though adults have more knowledge and more developed brains than children have. My research suggests that part of the... more

All normally developing babies learn to speak. For most adults, however, it is hard to learn a new language, even though adults have more knowledge and more developed brains than children have. My research suggests that part of the advantage children have when it comes to learning a language is related to what they do not know: it may be easier for babies to learn a language because they do not know as much about words as adults do! When babies learn language, they need to discover what words are: they learn both individual words and also “chunks” of language that go together, like “time-for-bed.” Because adults already know what a word is, they focus on learning new words when learning a new language, and pay less attention to the sequences. This makes it more difficult for them to learn the connections between words. In this article, I will explain how knowledge of words can explain some of the differences in learning a first and second language, and how our findings can help with...

Resumo: Os Lentivirus de Pequenos Ruminantes (LVPR) pertencem a familia Retroviridae e causam enfermidades cronicas e progressivas, conhecidas como artrite-encefalite caprina em caprinos e maedi-visna em ovinos. As celulas da linhagem... more

Resumo: Os Lentivirus de Pequenos Ruminantes (LVPR) pertencem a familia Retroviridae e causam enfermidades cronicas e progressivas, conhecidas como artrite-encefalite caprina em caprinos e maedi-visna em ovinos. As celulas da linhagem monocitico fagocitaria sao os principais alvos do virus no organismo animal, que nao consegue desenvolver resposta imune curativa. Baseando-se no fato de que a membrana nictitante (MN) sofre naturalmente infeccao, no organismo do animal, por estes virus, objetivou-se avaliar se essas sao passiveis para o cultivo e se possuem bom crescimento em cultura, visando a producao de antigeno de lentivirus caprino (LVC) para tecnica de imunodiagnostico. Sendo assim, realizou-se explant de celulas de MN de um animal negativo para LVPR. Essas celulas foram sub-cultivadas por tripsinizacao e entao inoculadas com a cepa padrao CAEV Cork. Os sobrenadantes foram coletados, clarificados por centrifugacao a 3.300g e concentrados em sistema AMICON®. Apos realizou-se o te...

Studies that have examined whole-school interventions that target conceptual knowledge reveal characteristics that are important in the delivery of a deep processing approach to word learning. These consist of explicit instruction, play,... more

Studies that have examined whole-school interventions that target conceptual knowledge reveal characteristics that are important in the delivery of a deep processing approach to word learning. These consist of explicit instruction, play, and multi-sensory experiences that are situated within and repeated across varied contexts. Word Aware (WA) is an example of a vocabulary intervention that incorporates such features. This study examined the effectiveness of the Early Years version of the WA programme in supporting the development of vocabulary knowledge in a sample of 92 children comparing them to a control group of 31 children who received usual teaching. Student speech and language therapists supported the testing and delivery of a 10-week intervention as part of their clinical placement and were interviewed along with the teachers on their perceptions of the intervention and their experiences collaborating with staff to support the whole school delivery of the programme. Informa...

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re‐analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical... more

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re‐analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social–pragmatic and data‐providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty‐three 2‐year‐old children revealed benefits of data provided in mother–child conversation, but no effects of social aspects of those conversations. The findings further revealed that the properties of data that benefit lexical development in 2‐year‐olds are quantity, lexical richness, and syntactic complexity. The nature of the computational mechanisms implied by these findings is discussed. An integrated account of the roles of social and computational processes to lexical development is proposed.

Variability in the input plays an important role in language learning. The current study examined the role of object variability for new word learning by preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Eighteen 4- and 5-year-old... more

Variability in the input plays an important role in language learning. The current study examined the role of object variability for new word learning by preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Eighteen 4- and 5-year-old children with SLI were taught 8 new words in 3 short activities over the course of 3 sessions. Half of the children saw 3 identical objects corresponding to each new word during training (No Variability group); the other half of the children saw 3 different objects corresponding to each new word during training (High Variability group). Children completed vocabulary learning tests for objects seen during training and for new within-category objects that were never seen during training as a test of category generalization. Learning was assessed the day after each training activity, and retention was assessed 3 weeks after the last training session. There were no group differences on trained or generalization items immediately following training sessions...