Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech: Verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers

Setoh, Peipei; Cheng, Michelle Y.; Bornstein, Marc H.; Esposito, Gianluca

doi:10.1017/s0305000920000720

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Kauschke et al, 2007;Tardif et al, 1997) and to what extent (concrete) noun bias is a universal phenomenon or rather purely language specific is a topic of great debate (for review, see Waxman et al, 2013). Novel data (Setoh et al, 2021) suggests, however, that the early noun dominance is indeed a widespread phenomenon with cross-linguistic differences exerting only a minor effect. Assuming that priority of object words in early language acquisition is indeed a fundamental feature of human language learning, one reason for this priority of the concrete could lie in the teaching strategies of adults or the persistence of solid objects, which, in contrast to instances of abstract concepts, do not change in a fast, situation-dependent manner.…”

Section: Category Differences In Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks

Henningsen-Schomers

Pulvermüller

2021

Psychological Research

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A neurobiologically constrained deep neural network mimicking cortical areas relevant for sensorimotor, linguistic and conceptual processing was used to investigate the putative biological mechanisms underlying conceptual category formation and semantic feature extraction. Networks were trained to learn neural patterns representing specific objects and actions relevant to semantically ‘ground’ concrete and abstract concepts. Grounding sets consisted of three grounding patterns with neurons representing specific perceptual or action-related features; neurons were either unique to one pattern or shared between patterns of the same set. Concrete categories were modelled as pattern triplets overlapping in their ‘shared neurons’, thus implementing semantic feature sharing of all instances of a category. In contrast, abstract concepts had partially shared feature neurons common to only pairs of category instances, thus, exhibiting family resemblance, but lacking full feature overlap. Stimulation with concrete and abstract conceptual patterns and biologically realistic unsupervised learning caused formation of strongly connected cell assemblies (CAs) specific to individual grounding patterns, whose neurons were spread out across all areas of the deep network. After learning, the shared neurons of the instances of concrete concepts were more prominent in central areas when compared with peripheral sensorimotor ones, whereas for abstract concepts the converse pattern of results was observed, with central areas exhibiting relatively fewer neurons shared between pairs of category members. We interpret these results in light of the current knowledge about the relative difficulty children show when learning abstract words. Implications for future neurocomputational modelling experiments as well as neurobiological theories of semantic representation are discussed.

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Section: Category Differences In Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks

Henningsen-Schomers

Pulvermüller

2021

Psychological Research

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“…A recent study has evaluated the verb to noun ratio of speech from parent-child interactions in a Singaporean bilingual population. Setoh et al (2021) found that most Singaporean Chinese mothers either used more verbs than nouns, or used similar number of verbs and nouns, in English and in Mandarin, thus suggesting that differences in the composition of parental input could be driving differences in the composition of their child's vocabulary. However, this finding falls short of explaining how Mandarin-English bilingual adults used more verbs in English than, say, Malaysian-English bilinguals adults in the first place.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extra-linguistic modulation of the English noun-bias: evidence from Malaysian bilingual infants and toddlers

et al. 2021

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Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is specific to the language itself, or that extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structures. To address this debate, the present study compares the relative distribution of verbs and nouns within the same language-English-between Malay-English and Mandarin-English bilingual infants and toddlers. The English receptive lexicons of Mandarin-English bilingual children contained more verbs than those of Malay-English bilinguals, suggesting that the nounbias is modulated by factors external to English. We discuss the potential role of socio-cultural differences on the composition of children early vocabularies.

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“…The first words children acquire vary by individual and reflect both the language the children are acquiring and the context in which that language is acquired. However, it appears to be consistent -at least across languages where this question has been studied in depth -that children generally acquire words for objects (nouns) before words for actions (verbs) (Gentner, 1982;Au et al, 1994;Caselli et al, 1995;Setoh et al, 2021).…”

Section: Referential Transparency Of Verbs In Child-directed Input By...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Referential transparency of verbs in child-directed input by Japanese and American caregivers

Fitch,

Lieberman,

Frank

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb usage by Japanese and American caregivers during dyadic play with their infants (5-22 months). We annotated verb-containing utterances for elements associated with referential transparency and compared across groups. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that Japanese caregivers used verbs in fewer referentially transparent contexts than American caregivers, or did not significantly differ from American caregivers, depending on the measure. These findings cast doubt on cross-cultural differences in referential transparency between Japanese and American child-directed input.

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Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech: Verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers

Cited by 12 publications

References 55 publications

Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks

Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks

Extra-linguistic modulation of the English noun-bias: evidence from Malaysian bilingual infants and toddlers

Referential transparency of verbs in child-directed input by Japanese and American caregivers

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