CiteULike: briordan's cross-situational

Learning Word-to-Meaning Mappings

Jeffrey Siskind — 2008-08-04T15:04:59-00:00

(2001), pp. xxx-xxx.

Word segmentation as word learning: Integrating meaning learning with distributional cues to segmentation

Michael Frank — 2008-07-31T21:14:47-00:00

(2007), pp. 218-229.

Conceptual knowledge increases infants' memory capacity

Lisa Feigenson — 2008-07-29T01:52:02-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 29. (2008), pp. 9926-9930.

Word-meaning association in early language development

Rushen Shi — 2008-07-11T16:26:22-00:00

Brain and Cognition, Vol. 67, No. Supplement 1. (June 2008), pp. 38-39.

Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning

Janet Werker — 2006-06-14T17:12:10-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 11. (November 2005), pp. 519-527.

By their first birthday, infants can understand many spoken words. Research in cognitive development has long focused on the conceptual changes that accompany word learning, but learning new words also entails perceptual sophistication. Several developmental steps are required as infants learn to segment, identify and represent the phonetic forms of spoken words, and map those word forms to different concepts. We review recent research on how infants' perceptual systems unfold in the service of word learning, from initial sensitivity for speech to the learning of language-specific sound patterns. Building on a recent theoretical framework and emerging new methodologies, we show how speech perception is crucial for word learning, and suggest that it bootstraps the development of a separate but parallel phonological system that links sound to meaning.

Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the "Enemy of Induction"?

Nate Kornell — 2008-06-11T13:24:59-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 6. (2008), pp. 585-592.

ABSTRACT- Inductive learning-that is, learning a new concept or category by observing exemplars-happens constantly, for example, when a baby learns a new word or a doctor classifies x-rays. What influence does the spacing of exemplars have on induction? Compared with massing, spacing enhances long-term recall, but we expected spacing to hamper induction by making the commonalities that define a concept or category less apparent. We asked participants to study multiple paintings by different artists, with a given artist's paintings presented consecutively (massed) or interleaved with other artists' paintings (spaced). We then tested induction by asking participants to indicate which studied artist (Experiments 1a and 1b) or whether any studied artist (Experiment 2) painted each of a series of new paintings. Surprisingly, induction profited from spacing, even though massing apparently created a sense of fluent learning: Participants rated massing as more effective than spacing, even after their own test performance had demonstrated the opposite.

An Efficient, Probabilistically Sound Algorithm for Segmentation and Word Discovery

Michael Brent — 2008-06-08T18:10:36-00:00

Machine Learning, Vol. 34, No. 1. (1 February 1999), pp. 71-105.

This paper presents a model-based, unsupervised algorithm for recovering word boundaries in a natural-language text from which they have been deleted. The algorithm is derived from a probability model of the source that generated the text. The fundamental structure of the model is specified abstractly so that the detailed component models of phonology, word-order, and word frequency can be replaced in a modular fashion. The model yields a language-independent, prior probability distribution on all possible sequences of all possible words over a given alphabet, based on the assumption that the input was generated by concatenating words from a fixed but unknown lexicon. The model is unusual in that it treats the generation of a complete corpus, regardless of length, as a single event in the probability space. Accordingly, the algorithm does not estimate a probability distribution on words; instead, it attempts to calculate the prior probabilities of various word sequences that could underlie the observed text. Experiments on phonemic transcripts of spontaneous speech by parents to young children suggest that our algorithm is more effective than other proposed algorithms, at least when utterance boundaries are given and the text includes a substantial number of short utterances.

Statistical cross-situational learning to build word-to-world mappings

Chen Yu — 2008-06-07T12:58:41-00:00

(2006)

The Influence of Grammatical, Local, and Organizational Redundancy on Implicit Learning: An Analysis Using Information Theory

Randall Jamieson — 2008-06-05T17:53:58-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 31, No. 1. (January 2005), pp. 9-23.

Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: The Roles of Adult and Child Learners in Language Formation and Change

Carla Kam — 2008-06-03T15:45:30-00:00

Language Learning and Development, Vol. 1, No. 2. (2005), pp. 151-195.

In this article we investigate what learners acquire when their input contains inconsistent grammatical morphemes such as those present in pidgins and incipient creoles. In particular, we ask if learners acquire variability veridically or if they change it, making the language more regular as they learn it. In Experiment 1 we taught adult participants an artificial language containing unpredictable variation in 1 grammatical feature. We manipulated the amount of inconsistency and the meaning of the inconsistent item. Postexposure testing showed that participants learned the language, including the variable item, despite the presence of inconsistency. However, their use of variable items reflected their input. Participants exposed to consistent patterns produced consistent patterns, and participants exposed to inconsistency reproduced that inconsistency; they did not make the language more consistent. The meaning of the inconsistent item had no effect. In Experiment 2 we taught adults and 5- to 7-year-old children a similar artificial language. As in Experiment 1, the adults did not regularize the language. However, many children did regularize the language, imposing patterns that were not the same as their input. These results suggest that children and adults do not learn from variable input in the same way. Moreover, they suggest that children may play a unique and important role in creole formation by regularizing grammatical patterns.

Word segmentation as word learning: Integrating stress and meaning with distributional cues

Michael Frank — 2008-06-01T02:49:51-00:00

(2007)

Information from multiple modalities helps five-month-olds learn abstract rules

Michael Frank — 2008-06-01T02:42:48-00:00

Developmental Science (in press)

Do Six-Month-Olds Link Sound Patterns of Common Nouns To New Exemplars?

Ruth Tincoff — 2008-05-30T15:21:39-00:00

(July 2000)

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Letitia Naigles — 2008-05-29T16:14:51-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 86, No. 2. (December 2002), pp. 157-199.

A developmental paradox is discussed: studies of infant processing of language and language-like stimuli indicate considerable ability to abstract patterns over specific items and to distinguish natural from unnatural English sentences. In contrast, studies of toddler language production find little ability to generalize patterns over specific English words or constructions. Thus, infants appear to be abstract auditory or language processors whereas toddlers appear to be non-abstract, item-specific language users. Three resolutions are offered to this paradox. The first, that no resolution is necessary because only the toddler findings come from language use in a communicative context and so only the toddler findings are relevant to linguistic knowledge, is rejected. The second, that the contradictions are rooted in the differing methodologies of the two sets of studies (comprehension vs. production), is found to explain important aspects of the contradictory findings. The third, that the contractions come from the differing content of the stimuli in the studies, is also found to be explanatory and is argued to carry greater weight. Resolution 3 suggests that the patterns that infants extract from their linguistic input are not yet tied to meaning; thus, toddlers do not lose these earlier-abstracted forms but their use of them is limited until they have been integrated with meaning. It is argued that in language acquisition, learning form is easy but learning meaning, and especially linking meanings and forms, is hard.

When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases.

L Gerken — 2008-05-29T16:11:27-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 51, No. 3. (March 1994), pp. 237-265.

According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP condition, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine if other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation.

Children's use of phonology to infer grammatical class in vocabulary learning.

KW Cassidy — 2008-05-29T16:07:24-00:00

Psychonomic bulletin & review, Vol. 8, No. 3. (September 2001), pp. 519-523.

Prior studies of the relationship between phonological information and grammatical category assignment have focused on whether these relationships exist and whether people have learned them. This study investigates whether these relationships affect preschool children's vocabulary acquisition in a laboratory setting. Child participants learned 12 vocabulary words (6 nouns and 6 verbs) under three conditions, in which, (1) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship matched English, (2) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship was opposite to English, or (3) there was no relationship between syllable number and grammatical category. In the initial presentation of the words, children assumed that the novel words matched the pattern found in English. When the syllable number/grammatical category pattern matched that of English, the children learned more of the words. Phonological information also predicted error patterns. These results suggest that any account of vocabulary acquisition should consider the role of phonological information.

Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in grammatical category assignments.

MH Kelly — 2008-05-29T16:03:53-00:00

Psychological review, Vol. 99, No. 2. (April 1992), pp. 349-364.

One ubiquitous problem in language processing involves the assignment of words to the correct grammatical category, such as noun or verb. In general, semantic and syntactic cues have been cited as the principal information for grammatical category assignment, to the neglect of possible phonological cues. This neglect is unwarranted, and the following claims are made: (a) Numerous correlations between phonology and grammatical class exist, (b) some of these correlations are large and can pervade the entire lexicon of a language and hence can involve thousands of words, (c) experiments have repeatedly found that adults and children have learned these correlations, and (d) explanations for how these correlations arose can be proposed and evaluated. Implications of these phenomena for language representation and processing are discussed.

Statistical learning in infants

Gerry Altmann — 2008-05-29T14:38:38-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 99, No. 24. (26 November 2002), pp. 15250-15251.

10.1073/pnas.262659399

Statistical learning in infant language development

Rebecca Gomez — 2008-05-25T01:34:08-00:00

(2007), pp. 601-616.

Visual Statistical Learning: Getting Some Help from the Auditory Modality

Christopher Robinson — 2008-05-22T02:00:59-00:00

Auditory Dominance: Overshadowing or Response Competition?

Christopher Robinson — 2008-05-22T01:44:02-00:00

(2007), pp. 605-610.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? The Flexible Nature of Modality Dominance in Young Children

Amanda Napolitano — 2004-12-28T18:09:51-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 75, No. 6. (2004), pp. 1850-1870.

Statistical approaches to language acquisition and the self-organizing consciousness: a reversal of perspective

Pierre Perruchet — 2008-05-13T19:43:05-00:00

Psychological Research, Vol. 69, No. 5. (1 June 2005), pp. 316-329.

Recent years have seen the upsurge of a new approach to language that moves away from the rule-based conventional framework. In this approach, mostly supported by the success of connectionist models, children learn language by exploiting the distributional properties of the input. It is argued in this paper that, in the same way as conforming to rules does not imply the existence of mental rules, conforming to statistical regularities does not imply that statistical computations are performed mentally. Sensitivity to statistical regularities can alternatively be conceived of as a by-product of the recurrent interplay between the properties of the current conscious content and the properties of the linguistic and extralinguistic environment. The validity of including the content of conscious experiences in an otherwise standard dynamical approach rooted in the notion of self-organization is discussed.

Role of Attention and Perceptual Grouping in Visual Statistical Learning

Chris Baker — 2008-05-13T19:07:33-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 15, No. 7. (2004), pp. 460-466.

Abstract- Statistical learning has been widely proposed as a mechanism by which observers learn to decompose complex sensory scenes. To determine how robust statistical learning is, we investigated the impact of attention and perceptual grouping on statistical learning of visual shapes. Observers were presented with stimuli containing two shapes that were either connected by a bar or unconnected. When observers were required to attend to both locations at which shapes were presented, the degree of statistical learning was unaffected by whether the shapes were connected or not. However, when observers were required to attend to just one of the shapes' locations, statistical learning was observed only when the shapes were connected. These results demonstrate that visual statistical learning is not just a passive process. It can be modulated by both attention and connectedness, and in natural scenes these factors may constrain the role of stimulus statistics in learning.

Implicit learning and statistical learning: one phenomenon, two approaches

Pierre Perruchet — 2006-09-15T05:46:55-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 10, No. 5. (May 2006), pp. 233-238.

The domain-general learning mechanisms elicited in incidental learning situations are of potential interest in many research fields, including language acquisition, object knowledge formation and motor learning. They have been the focus of studies on implicit learning for nearly 40 years. Stemming from a different research tradition, studies on statistical learning carried out in the past 10 years after the seminal studies by Saffran and collaborators, appear to be closely related, and the similarity between the two approaches is strengthened further by their recent evolution. However, implicit learning and statistical learning research favor different interpretations, focusing on the formation of chunks and statistical computations, respectively. We examine these differing approaches and suggest that this divergence opens up a major theoretical challenge for future studies.

Semantic reference and phrasal grouping in the acquisition of a miniature phrase structure language

Richard Meier — 2008-05-08T17:24:11-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 25, No. 4. (August 1986), pp. 492-505.

In this study we examine the roles of semantic reference and of grammatical morphology in the learning of an artificial syntax. Subjects assigned to one of three training conditions viewed sentences from a miniature phrase structure language. In the reference field condition, subjects saw sentences which each referred to an array of geometric figures. In the morphology condition no reference field was present, but inflectional suffixes marked each sentence's constituent structure. Control condition subjects studied sentences lacking semantic reference and inflectional morphology. Unlike control subjects, subjects in both the reference field and morphology conditions learned the miniature syntax, as evidenced by successful discrimination of novel grammatical versus ungrammatical sentences. Therefore, when surface features mark constituents, adult learning of complex syntactic regularities proceeds even in the absence of semantic reference.

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability

Janet Mcdonald — 2008-05-04T17:34:27-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 02. (2008), pp. 247-268.

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (<em>n</em>=68) and adults (<em>n</em>=19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed early mastery of some grammatical structures (e.g. word order, article omissions) while even the oldest children differed from adults on others (e.g. past tense, third person singular agreement). Working memory capacity and phonological ability accounted for variance in grammaticality judgments above and beyond age effects. In particular, working memory capacity correlated with structures involving verb morphology and word order; phonological ability was important for structures with low phonetic substance. Children's relative difficulty with the different constructions showed parallels to adult performance under memory load stress, indicating working memory capacity may be a limiting factor in their performance. Implications for performance by memory and phonologically impaired populations are discussed.

Phonological and semantic information in adults' orthographic learning

Kerry Chalmers — 2008-04-23T16:58:12-00:00

Acta Psychologica, Vol. 128, No. 1. (May 2008), pp. 162-175.

A training paradigm was used to assess the early stages of the acquisition of novel letter strings in adults. Provision of either phonological or semantic information during training improved spelling recognition (Experiment 1). Manipulation of the processing required during training (phonological, semantic, or both) produced no consistent effects on spelling when both phonology and meaning were provided (Experiment 2). An advantage of phonological over orthographic processing on spelling recognition and cued recall was found when meaning was provided during training but phonology was not (Experiment 3). The experiments support the role of phonological information in early learning of orthography, but additional research is required to clarify when and how semantic information supports the formation of new orthographic representations.

The link between statistical segmentation and word learning in adults

Daniel Mirman — 2008-04-22T01:09:39-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 108, No. 1. (July 2008), pp. 271-280.

Many studies have shown that listeners can segment words from running speech based on conditional probabilities of syllable transitions, suggesting that this statistical learning could be a foundational component of language learning. However, few studies have shown a direct link between statistical segmentation and word learning. We examined this possible link in adults by following a statistical segmentation exposure phase with an artificial lexicon learning phase. Participants were able to learn all novel object-label pairings, but pairings were learned faster when labels contained high probability (word-like) or non-occurring syllable transitions from the statistical segmentation phase than when they contained low probability (boundary-straddling) syllable transitions. This suggests that, for adults, labels inconsistent with expectations based on statistical learning are harder to learn than consistent or neutral labels. In contrast, a previous study found that infants learn consistent labels, but not inconsistent or neutral labels.

Fine-grained sensitivity to statistical information in adult word learning

Athena Vouloumanos — 2008-04-21T14:33:21-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 107, No. 2. (May 2008), pp. 729-742.

A language learner trying to acquire a new word must often sift through many potential relations between particular words and their possible meanings. In principle, statistical information about the distribution of those mappings could serve as one important source of data, but little is known about whether learners can in fact track multiple word-referent mappings, and, if they do, the precision with which they can represent those statistics. To test this, two experiments contrasted a pair of possibilities: that learners encode the fine-grained statistics of mappings in the input - both high- and low-frequency mappings - or, alternatively, that only high frequency mappings are represented. Participants were briefly trained on novel word-novel object pairs combined with varying frequencies: some objects were paired with one word, other objects with multiple words with differing frequencies (ranging from 10% to 80%). Results showed that participants were exquisitely sensitive to very small statistical differences in mappings. The second experiment showed that word learners' representation of low frequency mappings is modulated as a function of the variability in the environment. Implications for Mutual Exclusivity and Bayesian accounts of word learning are discussed.

Grammatical pattern learning by human infants and cotton-top tamarin monkeys

Jenny Saffran — 2008-04-20T22:19:39-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 107, No. 2. (May 2008), pp. 479-500.

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily acquire structures that are consistent with the form of natural language, whereas (b) non-human primates' patterns of learning should be less tightly linked to the structure of human languages. Prior experiments have not directly compared laboratory-based learning of grammatical structures by human infants and non-human primates, especially under comparable testing conditions and with similar materials. Five experiments with 12-month-old human infants and adult cotton-top tamarin monkeys addressed these predictions, employing comparable methods (familiarization-discrimination) and materials. Infants rapidly acquired complex grammatical structures by using statistically predictive patterns, failing to learn structures that lacked such patterns. In contrast, the tamarins only exploited predictive patterns when learning relatively simple grammatical structures. Infant learning abilities may serve both to facilitate natural language acquisition and to impose constraints on the structure of human languages.

Fast Mapping but Poor Retention by 24-Month-Old Infants

Jessica Horst — 2008-04-17T02:02:26-00:00

Infancy, Vol. 13, No. 2. (2008), pp. 128-157.

The effects of contextual constraints on spoken word recognition in an artificial lexicon

Kathleen Pirog — 2008-03-23T17:37:02-00:00

The Influence of Vowel Harmony on Turkish Native Speakers Learning an Artificial Language System

Asli Altan — 2008-03-19T13:23:02-00:00

(2008)

A Word-Order Constraint on Phonological Activation

Janssen — 2008-03-07T16:40:28-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 216-220.

Introduction: The typology and semantics of locative predicates: posturals, positionals, and other beasts

Felix Ameka — 2008-02-22T01:23:53-00:00

Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 45, No. 5. (October 2007), pp. 847-871.

Children's difficulty in learning homonyms

Martin Doherty — 2008-02-20T20:30:12-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 31 (2004), pp. 203-214.

Different Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying Word and Rule Extraction from Speech

Ruth Balaguer — 2008-02-15T15:07:24-00:00

PLoS ONE, Vol. 2, No. 11. (2007)

Segmenting dynamic human action via statistical structure

Dare Baldwin — 2008-02-12T16:55:31-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 106, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 1382-1407.

Human social, cognitive, and linguistic functioning depends on skills for rapidly processing action. Identifying distinct acts within the dynamic motion flow is one basic component of action processing; for example, skill at segmenting action is foundational to action categorization, verb learning, and comprehension of novel action sequences. Yet little is currently known about mechanisms that may subserve action segmentation. The present research documents that adults can register statistical regularities providing clues to action segmentation. This finding provides new evidence that structural knowledge gained by mechanisms such as statistical learning can play a role in action segmentation, and highlights a striking parallel between processing of action and processing in other domains, such as language.

Implicit learning of second-, third-, and fourth-order adjacent and nonadjacent sequential dependencies

Gilbert Remillard — 2008-02-08T01:40:22-00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 61, No. 3. (2008), pp. 400-424.

Serial reaction time (SRT) task studies have established that people can implicitly learn first- and second-order adjacent dependencies. Sequential confounds have made it impossible to draw conclusions regarding learning of nonadjacent dependencies and learning of third- and fourth-order adjacent dependencies. Addressing the confounds, the present study shows that people can implicitly learn second-, third-, and fourth-order adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies embedded in probabilistic sequences of target locations.

Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream: Functional Differences Between Vowels and Consonants

Juan Toro — 2008-02-08T01:26:56-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 2. (2008), pp. 137-144.

ABSTRACT- We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploit relations among vowels to extract generalizations, but tend to disregard the same relations among consonants. In our streams, participants could segment words on the basis of transitional probabilities in one tier and could extract a structural regularity in the other tier. Participants used consonants to extract words, but vowels to extract a structural generalization. They were unable to extract the same generalization using consonants, even when word segmentation was facilitated and the generalization made simpler. Our results suggest that different signal-driven computations prime lexical and grammatical processing.

Neural Responses to Structural Incongruencies in Language and Statistical Learning Point to Similar Underlying Mechanisms

Morten Christiansen — 2008-02-03T03:10:08-00:00

(2007), pp. 173-178.

From the Cover: Brain signatures of artificial language processing: Evidence challenging the critical period hypothesis

Angela Friederici — 2007-05-03T15:59:27-00:00

PNAS, Vol. 99, No. 1. (8 January 2002), pp. 529-534.

Adult second language learning seems to be more difficult and less efficient than first language acquisition during childhood. By using event-related brain potentials, we show that adults who learned a miniature artificial language display a similar real-time pattern of brain activation when processing this language as native speakers do when processing natural languages. Participants trained in the artificial language showed two event-related brain potential components taken to reflect early automatic and late controlled syntactic processes, whereas untrained participants did not. This result challenges the common view that late second language learners process language in a principally different way from native speakers. Our findings demonstrate that a small system of grammatical rules can be syntactically instantiated by the adult speaker in a way that strongly resembles native-speaker sentence processing. 10.1073/pnas.012611199

Maternal uses of non-object terms in child-directed speech: Color, number and time

Medha Tare — 2008-02-02T01:45:30-00:00

First Language, Vol. 28, No. 1. (1 February 2008), pp. 87-100.

Non-object terms including color, number and time words pose a challenge for word learning due in part to non-obvious word-referent mappings. Finding early word-word knowledge for such terms, Shatz has suggested that exposure to them in varied conversational contexts might facilitate word-word mappings. To address whether input feasibly carries such information, we examined longitudinal transcripts from the CHILDES database for the frequency and uses of subsets of color and number words in mothers' speech to toddlers and of time words to preschoolers. All the mothers studied made varied uses of the terms from these lexical categories. The findings support the argument that varied conversational input provides useful data for children to create early word-word mappings for non-object terms. 10.1177/0142723707085316

Variability and Detection of Invariant Structure

Rebecca Gomez — 2007-06-05T21:25:53-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 13, No. 5. (2002), pp. 431-436.

Two experiments investigated learning of nonadjacent dependencies by adults and 18-month-olds. Each learner was exposed to three-element strings (e.g., pel-kicey-jic) produced by one of two artificial languages. Both languages contained the same adjacent dependencies, so learners could distinguish the languages only by acquiring dependencies between the first and third elements (the nonadjacent dependencies). The size of the pool from which the middle elements were drawn was systematically varied to investigate whether increasing variability (in the form of decreasing predictability between adjacent elements) would lead to better detection of nonadjacent dependencies. Infants and adults acquired nonadjacent dependencies only when adjacent dependencies were least predictable. The results point to conditions that might lead learners to focus on nonadjacent versus adjacent dependencies and are important for suggesting how learning might be dynamically guided by statistical structure.

Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

Renate Zangl‌ — 2008-01-29T22:15:49-00:00

Language Learning and Development, Vol. 3, No. 3. (2007), pp. 199-231.

Names in frames: infants interpret words in sentence frames faster than words in isolation

Anne Fernald — 2006-04-13T03:58:21-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 9, No. 3. (May 2006), pp. F33-F40.

The Prep statistic as a measure of confidence in model fitting

Gregory Ashby — 2008-01-29T13:51:57-00:00

pp. 16-27.

In traditional statistical methodology (e.g., the ANOVA), confidence in the observed results is often assessed by computing the p value or the power of the test. In most cases, adding more participants to a study will improve these measures more than will increasing the amount of data collected from each participant. Thus, traditional statistical methods are biased in favor of experiments with large numbers of participants. This article proposes a method for computing confidence in the results of experiments in which data are collected from a few participants over many trials. In such experiments, it is common to fit a series of mathematical models to the resulting data and to conclude that the best-fitting model is superior. The probability of replicating this result (i.e., Prep) is derived for any two nested models. Simulations and empirical applications of this new statistic confirm its utility in studies in which data are collected from a few participants over many trials.

Distributional learning of syntactic categories

Malathi Thothathiri — 2008-01-28T03:28:44-00:00

Cross-situational observation and the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis

Jesse Snedeker — 2008-01-28T02:35:27-00:00