Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents' words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14-to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents' words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children's vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.language acquisition | word learning | SES C hildren's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school (1, 2). Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success (3), this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood. Some of this variability resides in the individual capacities and temperament that infants bring to the word learning task (4, 5). However, environmental influences are also bound to play instrumental roles. Accordingly, we examined the contextualized speech input parents provide to infants during the second year of life as a potential source of the massive vocabulary differences found at school entry.It is already known that the sheer quantity of linguistic input is an important determinant of vocabulary size; overall, the more words children hear early in development, the larger their subsequent vocabularies. This relationship holds true both for types (different words) and tokens (number of words heard, including repetitions) (6, 7). These quantity differences are correlated with socioeconomic status (SES). Children from low SES homes are typically exposed to fewer words early in development (8, 9) and have smaller vocabularies at school entry than children from high SES homes (10).Taken alone, the correlation of vocabulary size with amount of input is puzzling because as a general rule language learners do not seem to require a large number of exposures to a word to acquire its meaning (11). In experimental settings, for example, children have been shown to acquire and retain a new word heard only once or a very few times (12-14). The likelihood, then, is that certain exposures to a new word are especially informative, supporting secure and rapid inferences to meaning. For example, common sense insists that it will be ...

Two studies are presented which examined the temporal dynamics of the social-attentive behaviors that co-occur with referent identification during natural parent-child interactions in the home. Study 1 focused on 6.2 hours of videos of 56 parents interacting during everyday activities with their 14–18 month-olds, during which parents uttered common nouns as parts of spontaneously occurring utterances. Trained coders recorded, on a second-by-second basis, parent and child attentional behaviors relevant to reference in the period (40 sec.) immediately surrounding parental naming. The referential transparency of each interaction was independently assessed by having naïve adult participants guess what word the parent had uttered in these video segments, but with the audio turned off, forcing them to use only non-linguistic evidence available in the ongoing stream of events. We found a great deal of ambiguity in the input along with a few potent moments of word-referent transparency; these transparent moments have a particular temporal signature with respect to parent and child attentive behavior: it was the object’s appearance and/or the fact that it captured parent/child attention at the moment the word was uttered, not the presence of the object throughout the video, that predicted observers’ accuracy. Study 2 experimentally investigated the precision of the timing relation, and whether it has an effect on observer accuracy, by disrupting the timing between when the word was uttered and the behaviors present in the videos as they were originally recorded. Disrupting timing by only +/− 1 to 2 sec. reduced participant confidence and significantly decreased their accuracy in word identification. The results enhance an expanding literature on how dyadic attentional factors can influence early vocabulary growth. By hypothesis, this kind of time-sensitive data-selection process operates as a filter on input, removing many extraneous and ill-supported word-meaning hypotheses from consideration during children’s early vocabulary learning.

Before people seek support for an issue, they must choose whom in their support network to approach. Two prominent supporter-selection hypotheses are the attachment figure hypothesis and the strong ties hypothesis, housed in psychology and sociology, respectively. People are expected to have a special preference for attachment figures and also for strong ties and to seek them more frequently than others. Despite the widespread acceptance of these hypotheses, neither has ever been tested, we argue, with the most appropriate methods for their claims. Moreover, no one has ever tested whether the 2 theories might not be independent, that is, whether one might subsume the other. To properly test the theories, one requires intranetwork, enacted support-seeking data, and the theories must be modeled not just separately but also simultaneously. The present article reports 3 such studies. In Studies 1 and 3, a sample of adults reported their supporter-selection decisions for a single stressful event, and in Study 2, a sample of emerging adults reported their supporter-selection decisions for a period of 2 weeks. Evidence showed that each theory uniquely predicted supporter-selection decisions. For each theory the data revealed both expected and unexpected findings. Attachment figures were selectively sought for support, but this preference did not get stronger as issues became more severe. Stronger ties were selected more often than weaker ties; however, the strong tie effect emerged as 2 independent effects rather than one (closeness and interaction frequency). Taken together, the studies supported both theories, but also suggest the need for further theoretical development.

Past support-seeking research has examined how much support people seek (strategic level) or the way they seek it (tactical level). However, there are questions that can only be answered by looking at both levels simultaneously. In this article, we investigated how the overall amount of support sought can be decomposed into two component tactics: the number of supporters one seeks (breadth) and the amount one seeks from each supporter (depth). In a 2-week diary study of support seeking, it was found that gender and attachment differences in overall support seeking were driven by the breadth rather than the depth of seeking. It was also found that breadth was associated with increases in perceived support availability, whereas both breadth and depth were associated with increases in self-esteem.

Children greatly vary in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic contexts, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents’ words from (muted) videos of their interactions with 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents’ words could by identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children's vocabulary 3 years later, even after controlling for input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socio-economic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.