Assessing a continuum of lexical–semantic knowledge in the second year of life: A multimodal approach

Abstract

Behavioral dissociations in young children’s visual and haptic responses have been taken as evidence that word knowledge is not all-or-none but instead exists on a continuum from absence of knowledge, to partial knowledge, to robust knowledge. This longitudinal study tested a group of 16- to 18-month-olds, 6 months after their initial visit, to replicate results of partial understanding as shown by visual–haptic dissociations and to determine whether partial knowledge of word–referent relations can be leveraged for future word recognition. Results show that, like 16-month-olds, 22-month-olds demonstrate behavioral dissociations exhibited by rapid visual reaction times to a named referent but incorrect haptic responses. Furthermore, results suggest that partial word knowledge at one time predicts the degree to which that word will be understood in the future.

Looking represents choosing in toddlers: Exploring the equivalence between multimodal measures in forced‐choice tasks

“…Therefore, it may be recommended and beneficial that both results from pointing and looking measures, and the proportion of absent pointing responses should be reported to interpret obtained data in more detail. In fact, some researchers conducted a similar task using both modalities as dependent variables and compared differences between them (Abbot- Smith et al, 2017;Gurteen et al, 2011;Hendrickson & Friend, 2013;Hendrickson et al, 2015Hendrickson et al, , 2017. Future research is needed to investigate a more nuanced relationship between looking and manual measurements.…”

“…Hendrickson and Friend (2013) claimed that looking and manual responses reflect different levels of word understanding, based on connectionist studies (Munakata, 2001; Munakata & McClelland, 2003). Hendrickson et al (2017) further revealed that, in the familiar word comprehension task, words for which toddlers did not execute reaching at 16 months were still unknown at 22 months, whereas words for which 16‐month‐olds reached to distracter rather than target stimulus were more likely to be known six months later. These findings indicate that the absence of manual responses itself has insightful information on early word knowledge (e.g., fragility or uncertainty).…”

“…To our knowledge, Hendrickson and colleagues are the only researchers who conducted the FCP and the IPL paradigms simultaneously to toddlers (Hendrickson & Friend, 2013;Hendrickson et al, 2015Hendrickson et al, , 2017. In Hendrickson and Friend (2013), 16-to 18-month-olds participated in the familiar word comprehension task.…”

“…Referring to recent connectionist studies (Munakata, 2001;Munakata & McClelland, 2003), Hendrickson and colleagues interpreted these findings as looking and manual responses reflect different levels of understanding for the word-referent association, that is, preferential looking can be observed even when representations of words are fragile, whereas reaching can be demonstrated for only robust representations. Their subsequent studies enhanced this view and further explored the way to detect children's knowledge status on a certain word by leveraging both looking and manual measures (Hendrickson et al, 2015(Hendrickson et al, , 2017. However, since they have mostly focused on the different interpretability between two modalities, the question of how well each measure can be interpreted as equivalent is still unexplored.…”

“…However, since methods using manual measures require a volitional response of arm movement, it is often uncertain how to address absent responses if observed, particularly when applying these methods to toddlers (Hendrickson et al, 2015). For example, Hendrickson et al (2017) reported that, in a familiar word comprehension task, absent touching responses were seen for roughly one‐third of trials in 16‐month‐olds and 10% in 22‐month‐olds. Hagihara and Sakagami (2020) also reported that from 52 participants aged 19–35 months, 9 toddlers (17%) were excluded due to the difficulty in coding pointing responses.…”