CiteULike: briordan's semantic-development

Are lions and tigers substitutes or associates? Evidence against slot-filler accounts of children's early categorization

Elisa Krackow — 2008-07-30T23:11:59-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 69, No. 2. (1998), pp. 347-354.

Conceptual Organization at 6 and 8 Years of Age: Evidence From the Semantic Priming of Object Decisions

Naomi Hashimoto — 2008-07-30T21:32:26-00:00

J Speech Lang Hear Res, Vol. 50, No. 1. (1 February 2007), pp. 161-176.

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to examine children's knowledge of semantic relations. MethodIn Experiment 1, the 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults participated in an object decision task. Participants in the primed group made object decisions in response to primes that were related taxonomically, thematically, or perceptually to the target objects. Those in the unprimed group made decisions about the same stimuli without the benefit of primes. In Experiment 2, the children in the primed group explained the taxonomic and thematic relations between the prime-target pairs used in Experiment 1. ResultsIn Experiment 1, the strength of semantic relations did not vary with type or age, as taxonomic priming was as strong as thematic priming and the degree of priming did not reliably differentiate the 3 age groups. Differential priming effects between taxonomic and perceptual conditions, the former hastening and the latter slowing responses, suggested that the relation binding object concepts into taxonomies was not reducible to common physical features. In Experiment 2, the 6-year-olds had more difficulty describing taxonomic than thematic relations, whereas the 8-year-olds described both with ease. ConclusionsContrary to the shift hypothesis, taxonomic and thematic relationsstructure concepts in children as young as 6 and into adulthood. In accord with the performance hypothesis, 6-year-olds' representations of taxonomic relations are fragile and vulnerable to high task demands. 10.1044/1092-4388(2007/014)

A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development

Maria Caselli — 2008-07-30T21:29:44-00:00

Cognitive Development, Vol. 10, No. 2. ( 1995), pp. 159-199.

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that children can vary markedly in rate, style, and sequence of grammatical development, within and across natural languages. It is less clear whether there are robust cross-linguistic differences in early lexical development, with particular reference to the onset and rate of growth in major lexical categories (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives and grammatical function words). In this study, we present parental report data on the first stages of expressive and receptive lexical development for 659 English infants and 195 Italian infants between 8 and 16 months of age. Although there are powerful structural differences between English and Italian that could affect the order in which nouns and verbs are acquired, no differences were observed between these languages in the emergence and growth of lexical categories. In both languages, children begin with words that are difficult to classify in adult part-of-speech categories (i.e., "routines"). This is followed by a period of sustained growth in the proportion of vocabulary contributed by common nouns. Verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words are extremely rare until children have vocabularies of at least 100 words. The same sequences are observed in production and comprehension, although verbs are reported earlier for receptive vocabulary. Our results are compared with other reports in the literature, with special reference to recent claims regarding the early emergence of verbs in Korean.

Priming and lexical interference in infancy

Suzy Styles — 2008-07-30T21:20:44-00:00

(2008), pp. 651-656.

Early lexical development of Finnish children: A longitudinal study

Suvi Stolt — 2008-07-29T02:06:07-00:00

First Language, Vol. 28, No. 3. (1 August 2008), pp. 259-279.

The growth rate and the development of the composition of the receptive and expressive lexicon were studied in a longitudinal sample of 35 Finnish children. The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory was used to gather data of the receptive lexicon at 0;9, 1;0 and 1;3, and the expressive lexicon at 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6 and 2;0. The receptive lexicon was acquired earlier, at a faster rate and with higher individual variation than the expressive lexicon. A gender difference was found in expressive vocabulary, but not in receptive vocabulary. The growth trajectories of semantic lexical categories detected in both lexicons resembled each other. Verbs were acquired more readily in receptive lexicons. Results support a universal sequence in the development of the composition of the lexicon. 10.1177/0142723708091051

Semantic organization of basic-level words in 20-month-olds: An ERP study

Janne Torkildsen — 2008-07-06T19:38:05-00:00

Journal of Neurolinguistics (2006), pp. 431-454.

Electrophysiological correlates of auditory semantic priming in 24-month-olds

Janne Torkildsen — 2008-07-06T19:34:58-00:00

Journal of Neurolinguistics, Vol. 20 (2007), pp. 332-351.

Priming and lexical interference in infancy

Suzy Styles — 2008-07-06T19:15:09-00:00

(2008)

Comparing Semantic Space Models Using Child-Directed Speech

Brian Riordan — 2008-07-06T00:30:17-00:00

(2007)

A semantic space for modeling children's semantic memory

Guy Denhière — 2008-07-04T21:10:44-00:00

(2007), pp. 143-165.

The acquisition of word meaning through global lexical co-occurrences

Ping Li — 2008-07-04T20:56:38-00:00

(2000), pp. 167-178.

A solution to Plato's problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge

Thomas Landauer — 2008-07-03T16:31:08-00:00

Psychological Review, Vol. 104, No. 2. (1997), pp. 211-240.

Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary

Judith Goodman — 2008-06-29T16:13:27-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 03. (2008), pp. 515-531.

Studies examining factors that influence when words are learned typically investigate one lexical category or a small set of words. We provide the first evaluation of the relation between input frequency and age of acquisition for a large sample of words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory provides norming data on age of acquisition for 562 individual words collected from the parents of children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6. The CHILDES database provides estimates of frequency with which parents use these words with their children (age: 0 ; 7–7 ; 5; mean age: 36 months). For production, across all words higher parental frequency is associated with later acquisition. Within lexical categories, however, higher frequency is related to earlier acquisition. For comprehension, parental frequency correlates significantly with the age of acquisition only for common nouns. Frequency effects change with development. Thus, frequency impacts vocabulary acquisition in a complex interaction with category, modality and developmental stage.

Comparing semantic space models using child-directed speech

Brian Riordan — 2008-06-20T20:57:59-00:00

(2007), pp. 599-604.

Acquisition of mental state language in Spanish children: a longitudinal study of the relationship between the production of mental verbs and linguistic development

Belen Pascual — 2008-06-14T11:38:29-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 4. (2008), pp. 454-466.

Abstract The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 , 4, 4 , and 5 years of age. We coded and categorized the 40,250 utterances children produced during the five time points, 1202 (3.01%) of which had mental terms. In this sample, mental state language in Spanish children developed with a similar timeline and patterns as described in English-speaking children. However, several findings were novel for studies of mental state language. The general indexes of syntactic development did not correlate with the production of mental terms. The Index of Lexical Diversity was associated with the frequency of references to verbs of desire. The results of regression analyses suggest that not only the development of subordinate sentences with complement is associated with genuine mental references to desires and beliefs, but the development of lexical skills as well.

Temporal dynamics of perisylvian activation during language processing in children and adults

Jens Brauer — 2008-06-13T01:42:05-00:00

NeuroImage, Vol. 41, No. 4. (15 July 2008), pp. 1484-1492.

The perisylvian region of the human cortex is known to play a major role in language processing. Especially the superior temporal cortex (STC) and the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) have been investigated with respect to their particular involvement in language comprehension. In the present research, the timing of recruitment of these language-related brain areas in both hemispheres was examined as a function of age using functional imaging data of 6-year-old children and adults with a special focus on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response time courses. The results show that children's activation time courses differ from that of adults. First, children show an overall later peak of BOLD responses. Second, children's IFC responds much later than their STC, while in adults the difference between both regions is less pronounced. Within the STC, both groups show similar regionally U-shaped activation patterns with fastest peaks in voxels at the STC's mid-portion around Heschl's gyrus and longer latencies in anterior and posterior directions, suggesting a coarsely similar information flow in adults and children in the temporal region. Finally, children in contrast to adults, display a temporal primacy of right over left hemispheric activation. The observed overall latency differences between children and adults are in line with the assumption of ongoing maturation in perisylvian brain regions and the connections between them. A functional perspective on BOLD timing argues for a developmental change from higher processing costs in children compared to adults due to slower and less automatic language processes, in particular those located in the IFC. The observed hemispheric differences are discussed in the context of developmental models assuming a high reliance on right-hemisphere-based suprasegmental information processing during language comprehension in childhood.

How features create knowledge of kinds

Shohei Hidaka — 2008-06-06T18:28:40-00:00

(2008)

gCLUTO Documentation, Version 1.0

Matt Rasmussen — 2008-05-28T18:25:40-00:00

(2003)

Object and action picture naming in three- and five-year-old children

Jackie Masterson — 2008-05-04T18:02:33-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 02. (2008), pp. 373-402.

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children's language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures. In Experiment 1, action pictures produced more errors than object pictures for the three-year-olds, but not the five-year-olds. A qualitative analysis of the errors revealed a somewhat different pattern of errors across age groups. In Experiment 2 there was no robust difference in accuracy for the actions and objects but naming times were longer for actions. Across both experiments, imageability was a robust predictor of object naming performance, while spoken frequency was the most important predictor of action naming. The results are discussed in terms of possible differences in the manner in which nouns and verbs are acquired.

Lexical Categories at the Edge of the Word

Luca Onnis — 2008-04-30T13:50:01-00:00

Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1. (2008), pp. 184-221.

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2-layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word-edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development.

MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: User’s Guide and Technical Manual, Second Edition

L Fenson — 2008-04-27T19:22:36-00:00

(2007)

Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology

Aleka Blackwell — 2008-04-27T19:17:30-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 32, No. 03. (2005), pp. 535-562.

A computational model of children's semantic memory

Guy Denhière — 2008-04-18T17:07:38-00:00

(2004), pp. 297-302.

Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

Janet Werker — 2008-04-02T00:44:07-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 4. (April 2008), pp. 144-151.

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

The shape of controversy: what counts as an explanation of development? Introduction to the Special Section

Larissa Samuelson — 2008-03-24T00:39:58-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 2. (2008), pp. 183-184.

Rational statistical inference and cognitive development

Fei Xu — 2008-03-23T01:13:42-00:00

The Large-Scale Structure of Semantic Networks: Statistical Analyses and a Model of Semantic Growth

Mark Steyvers‌ — 2008-03-20T15:03:59-00:00

Cognitive Science, Vol. 29, No. 1. (2005), pp. 41-78.

Developing Object Concepts in Infancy: An Associative Learning Perspective

David Rakison — 2008-03-19T00:35:12-00:00

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 73, No. 1. (2008)

Preschool children's use of cues to generic meaning

Andrei Cimpian — 2008-03-15T22:04:07-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 107, No. 1. (April 2008), pp. 19-53.

Sentences that refer to categories - generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly") - are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues. The first three experiments tested whether 3- and 4-year-olds use (a) the immediate linguistic context, (b) their previous knowledge, and (c) the social context to determine whether an utterance with ambiguous scope (e.g., "They are afraid of mice", spoken while pointing to 2 birds) is generic. Four-year-olds were able to take advantage of all the cues provided, but 3-year-olds were sensitive only to the first two. In Experiment 4, we tested the relative strength of linguistic-context cues and previous-knowledge cues by putting them in conflict; in this task, 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, preferred to base their interpretations on the explicit noun phrase cues from the linguistic context. These studies indicate that, from early on, children can use contextual and semantic information to construe sentences as generic, thus taking advantage of the category knowledge conveyed in these sentences.

Predicting word-naming and lexical decision times from a semantic space model

Brendan Johns — 2008-02-27T15:25:39-00:00

A theory of the discovery and predication of relational concepts

Leonidas Doumas — 2008-02-16T02:46:34-00:00

Psychological Review, Vol. 115, No. 1. (January 2008), pp. 1-43.

Object naming and later lexical development: From baby bottle to beer bottle

Eef Ameel — 2007-11-05T15:31:37-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

Despite arguments for the relative ease of learning common noun meanings, semantic development continues well past the early years of language acquisition even for names of concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns during later lexical development. Children aged 5-14 years and adults named common household objects and their naming patterns were compared. Children showed a gradual convergence to the adult categories through addition of new words to the vocabulary as well as extended reorganizations of existing categories. Different theories of early lexical development make competing proposals about the differences in featural knowledge that result in discrepancies from adult word use. To evaluate these theories with respect to later lexical development, we used features collected from adults and children to predict the naming patterns of the different age groups. Consistent with [Mervis, C. B. (1987). Child-basic object categories and early lexical development. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorisation (pp. 201-233). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], children gradually learned to attend to the adult feature sets and to assign the features the appropriate weights. A sorting task showed that, furthermore, evolution of general conceptual knowledge as well as word-specific knowledge contributes to the convergence. We discuss implications for developing a theory of later lexical development.

Is there preferential attachment in the growth of early semantic noun networks?

Thomas Hills — 2008-02-08T21:13:59-00:00

(submitted)

A model of grounded language acquisition: Sensorimotor features improve lexical and grammatical learning

Steve Howell — 2005-06-21T09:18:01-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 53, No. 2. (August 2005), pp. 258-276.

It is generally accepted that children have sensorimotor mental representations for concepts even before they learn the words for those concepts. We argue that these prelinguistic and embodied concepts direct and ground word learning, such that early concepts provide scaffolding by which later word learning, and even grammar learning, is enabled and facilitated. We gathered numerical ratings of the sensorimotor features of many early words (352 nouns, 90 verbs) using adult human participants. We analyzed the ratings to demonstrate their ability to capture the embodied meaning of the underlying concepts. Then using a simulation experiment we demonstrated that with language corpora of sufficient complexity, neural network (SRN) models with sensorimotor features perform significantly better than models without features, as evidenced by their ability to perform word prediction, an aspect of grammar. We also discuss the possibility of indirect acquisition of grounded meaning through "propagation of grounding" for novel words in these networks.

Early Language Development: Bridging Brain and Behaviour

2008-02-02T01:34:05-00:00

(2008)

Support for hybrid models of the age of acquisition of English nouns

Jamie Reilly — 2008-01-30T03:53:57-00:00

pp. 1164-1170.

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic construct that refers to the chronological age at which a given word is acquired. Contemporary theories of AoA have focused on lexical acquisition with respect to either the developing phonological or semantic systems. One way of testing the relative dominance of phonological or semantic contributions is through open-source psycholinguistic databases, whereby AoA may be correlated with other variables (e.g., morphology, semantics, phonology). We report two multiple regression analyses conducted on a corpus of English nouns with, respectively, subjective and objective AoA measures as the dependent variables and a combination of 10 predictors, including 2 semantic, 4 phonological, 2 morphological, and 2 lexical. This multivariate combination of predictors accounted for significant proportions of the variance of AoA in both analyses. We argue that this evidence supports hybrid models of language development that integrate multiple levels of processing—from sound to meaning.

The cause of infant categorization

Amy Booth — 2008-01-29T02:24:38-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 106, No. 2. (February 2008), pp. 984-993.

We asked whether infants are sensitive to causal relations between objects and outcomes and whether this sensitivity supports categorization. Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants were familiarized with objects from a novel category. For some, the objects caused an electronic toy to activate. For others, the objects were present during activation of the toy, but did not cause the event. For the remaining infants, the events were never activated. Infants were asked to select another category member from a pair of previously unseen objects (one from the familiar, and one from a novel, category). Infants were more likely to select the category match in the causal than the non-causal and no outcome conditions, suggesting that they capitalize on causal information in forming object categories.

Learning overhypotheses with hierarchical Bayesian models

Kemp — 2007-04-21T23:15:36-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 10, No. 3. (May 2007), pp. 307-321.

First Language Acquisition

Eve Clark — 2007-12-20T15:06:48-00:00

(2003)

Conceptual perspective and lexical choice in acquisition

Eve Clark — 2007-12-20T15:02:36-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 64, No. 1. (July 1997), pp. 1-37.

Adult speakers choose among perspectives when they talk, with different words picking out different perspectives (e.g., the dog, our pet, that animal). The many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire, and, therefore, from the first, readily apply multiple terms to the same objects or events. And adults offer children pragmatic directions about the meanings of new words and hence about new perspectives. In contrast, the one-perspective account proposes that children are able, at first, to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Evidence for the many-perspectives account comes from a range of sources: children spontaneously use more than one term for the same object (horse and chair for a toy horse); they construct novel words to mark alternate perspectives (Dalmatian-dog vs. dog); they shift perspective when asked (from cat to animal, or sailor to bear for anthropomorphic characters); and they readily learn new terms for talking about already-labelled kinds. Children sometimes fail to learn new words or fail to relate them to words already known, but only in situations that lack adequate pragmatic directions.

Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science

2007-12-20T14:49:20-00:00

(2005)

Biased to learn language

Sebastian-Galles — 2007-10-31T06:48:58-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 10, No. 6. (November 2007), pp. 713-718.

Semantic packing as a core mechanism of category cohesiveness, fast mapping, and basic level categories

Shohei Hidaka — 2007-12-11T02:13:29-00:00

(2006), pp. 1500-1505.

Use of the mutual exclusivity assumption by young word learners

Ellen Markman — 2007-12-05T02:32:52-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 47, No. 3. (November 2003), pp. 241-275.

A critical question about early word learning is whether word learning constraints such as mutual exclusivity exist and foster early language acquisition. It is well established that children will map a novel label to a novel rather than a familiar object. Evidence for the role of mutual exclusivity in such indirect word learning has been questioned because: (1) it comes mostly from 2 and 3-year-olds and (2) the findings might be accounted for, not by children avoiding second labels, but by the novel object which creates a lexical gap children are motivated to fill. Three studies addressed these concerns by having only a familiar object visible. Fifteen to seventeen and 18-20-month-olds were selected to straddle the vocabulary spurt. In Study 1, babies saw a familiar object and an opaque bucket as a location to search. Study 2 handed babies the familiar object to play with. Study 3 eliminated an obvious location to search. On the whole, babies at both ages resisted second labels for objects and, with some qualifications, tended to search for a better referent for the novel label. Thus mutual exclusivity is in place before the onset of the naming explosion. The findings demonstrate that lexical constraints enable babies to learn words even under non-optimal conditions--when speakers are not clear and referents are not visible. The results are discussed in relation to an alternative social-pragmatic account.

Children construct novel word meaning ad-hoc based on known words: Computational model of shape and material biases

Kosuke Kurosaki — 2007-11-07T01:59:16-00:00

Cognitive Systems Research, Vol. 8, No. 2. (June 2007), pp. 110-130.

Taking the stance that two well-known word learning biases (shape and material bias) are formed through learning (learned bias account, LBA), we illustrated a concrete computational mechanism with "ad-hoc meaning substitution (AMS)" hypothesis, and verified it by two computer simulations. AMS represents that when given a novel word and a corresponding instance, children create novel word meaning by using the known word meaning and the instance as an ad-hoc template. The AMS function enables fast mapping and vocabulary spurt. To describe the AMS process computationally, we introduced "word distributional prototype (WDP)," which is the explicit representation of word meaning with an inductive learning function. Simulation 1 revealed that when a network with WDP and AMS was given a biased vocabulary reflecting young children, it demonstrated shape, material, and overgeneralized shape biases. This result suggested that a triad of word meaning induction, ad-hoc meaning substitution, and early biased vocabulary is essential for the emergence of biases. Simulation 2 introduced the notion of maturity that denoted a degree of learning convergence for each word meaning, and then the network showed neither shape nor material bias during an early small vocabulary. This result indicated that the period at which each bias emerges is decided by maturity. Though AMS consists of simpler and valider mechanisms than those proposed in previous studies, it could reproduce behavior of shape and material biases and explain their emergence process clearly. These results suggest that phenomena concerning shape and material biases are explicable with a simple ad-hoc learning instead of meta-learning among LBA or innate language-specific ones.

Relations Among Word Meanings in Early Lexical Development

Sandra Waxman — 2007-11-05T15:33:18-00:00

Developmental Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 5. (September 1992), pp. 862-873.

When deriving the meanings of individual words, children must also discern the relations among words. To ascertain how children interpret such relations, we taught twelve 2-year-olds novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Although we never specified the relations among words, children's interpretation of the relations was mediated by the similarity of the objects. For dissimilar objects, children interpreted the words as mutually exclusive. For more similar objects, children's performance was consistent with a hierarchical interpretation of meaning. Thus, by 2 years of age, children have the conceptual and lexical abilities necessary for the establishment of hierarchical inclusion relations. The significance of this finding for theories of lexical and conceptual development is discussed.

How bilinguals solve the naming problem

Eef Ameel — 2007-03-01T02:56:58-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 53, No. 1. (July 2005), pp. 60-80.

If different languages map words onto referents in different ways, bilinguals must either (a) learn and maintain separate mappings for their two languages or (b) merge them and not be fully native-like in either. We replicated and extended past findings of cross-linguistic differences in word-to-referent mappings for common household objects using Belgian monolingual speakers of Dutch and French. We then examined word-to-referent mappings in Dutch-French bilinguals by comparing the way they named in their two languages. We found that the French and Dutch bilingual naming patterns converged on a common naming pattern, with only minor deviations. Through the mutual influence of the two languages, the category boundaries in each language move towards one another and hence diverge from the boundaries used by the native speakers of either language. Implications for the organization of the bilingual lexicon are discussed.

Structure and Deterioration of Semantic Memory: A Neuropsychological and Computational Investigation

Timothy Rogers — 2007-10-25T00:57:11-00:00

Psychological Review, Vol. 111, No. 1. (2004), pp. 205-235.

Evidence for Knowledge-Based Category Discrimination in Infancy

Sabina Pauen — 2007-10-25T00:52:11-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 73, No. 4. (2002), pp. 1016-1033.

Two studies examined whether infants' category discrimination in an object-examination task was based solely on an ad hoc analysis of perceptual similarities among the experimental stimuli. In Experiment 1A, 11-month-olds examined four different exemplars of one superordinate category (animals or furniture) twice, followed by a new exemplar of the familiar category and an exemplar of the contrasting category. Group A (N = 39) explored natural-looking toy replicas with low between-category similarity, whereas group B (N = 40) explored artificial-looking toy models with high between-category similarity. Experiment 1B (N = 40) tested a group of 10-month-olds with the same design. Experiment 1C (N = 20) reversed the order of test trials. For Experiment 2 (N = 20), the same artificial-looking toy animals as in Experiment 1 (group B) were used for familiarization), but no category change was introduced at the end of the session. Infants' responses varied systematically only with the presence of a category change, and not with the degree of between-category similarity. This supports the hypothesis that performance was knowledge based.

The role of theories in conceptual coherence

Gregory Murphy — 2007-10-25T00:47:42-00:00

Psychological Review, Vol. 92 (1985), pp. 289-316.