Distributional structure in language: Contributions to noun–verb difficulty differences in infant word recognition

Willits, Jon A.; Seidenberg, Mark S.; Saffran, Jenny R.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.05.004

Cited by 15 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…These relationships also encode grammatical form (e.g., -er is associated with nouns, -ing with verbs). It might be tempting to consider morphologically complex words as marginal and not part of more ''typical'' language, but morphologically complex words are common in English and their phonological-semanticgrammatical regularities have been shown to affect word learning in infants (Willits et al, 2014). In adults, regularities between phonological, orthographic, semantic, and grammatical knowledge drive very early stages of language comprehension, even before conscious word recognition (Dikker et al, 2010).…”

Section: Separated Representations In Memory-modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Schwering

MacDonald

2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks. Modern theories of comprehension emphasize that people learn a vast web of correlated information about the language and the world and must activate that information from long-term memory to cope with the demands of language input. To date, there has been little consideration in theories of verbal working memory for how this rich input from comprehension would affect the nature of temporary memory. There has also been relatively little attention to the degree to which language production processes naturally manage serial order of verbal information. The authors argue for an emergent model of verbal working memory supported by a rich, distributed long-term memory for language. On this view, comprehension processes provide encoding in verbal working memory tasks, and production processes maintenance, serial ordering, and recall. Moreover, the computational capacity to maintain and order information varies with language experience. Implications for theories of working memory, comprehension, and production are considered.

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Section: Separated Representations In Memory-modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Schwering

MacDonald

2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Word forms that are consonant initial are segmented from speech before those that are vowel initial (Kim & Sundara 2014, Seidl & Johnson 2008, and word-object pairings are formed more readily when labels are composed of legal phonotactic sequences or frequent lexical stress patterns (Graf Estes & Bowen 2013). Prosodic characteristics (e.g., Seidl & Johnson 2006, Shukla et al 2011 and grammatical word class (e.g., Gillette et al 1999, Nazzi et al 2005, Willits et al 2014) also affect the ease of acquisition, as does speech register (Ma et al 2011, Thiessen et al 2005. Perhaps relatedly, hearing many variable tokens of a word can also aid the formation of word-object pairings (Rost & McMurray 2009).…”

Section: Factors Affecting Word Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing a Proto-Lexicon: An Integrative View of Infant Language Development

Johnson

2016

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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Infants begin learning the phonological structure of their native language remarkably early and use this information to extract word-sized chunks from the speech signal. While acquiring the language-specific segmentation strategies appropriate for their native language, infants are simultaneously beginning to form word-object pairings and learning which sound contrasts are meaningful in the native language. They are also working out how to assign words to word classes, paying attention to the use and placement of function words, and learning how speakers of the language string words together to form sensible grammatical utterances. Amazingly, infants tackle all of these tasks simultaneously, with success in each of these domains dependent on success in the others. This review focuses on infants' discovery of word forms in speech, their construction of a proto-lexicon, and the development of linguistic knowledge during their first year and a half of life. By discussing the development of lexical knowledge in relation to other aspects of linguistic development, I demonstrate the advantages of an integrative approach to understanding early language acquisition.

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“…Structures that support language use develop through statistical learning over the input to the child, constrained by the state of the child's developing perceptual, motor, and memory systems (Seidenberg, 1997). There is a robust empirical enterprise devoted to identifying the properties of statistical learning, such as the kinds of units it operates over (Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, 2005;Willits, Seidenberg, & Saffran, 2014), whether learning occurs over nonadjacent elements (Newport & Aslin, 2004), whether it occurs over different types of structures simultaneously (Sahni, Seidenberg, & Saffran, 2010) and so on. In a parallel development, studies of adult performance now focus on the use of language statistics in online processing (MacDonald & Seidenberg, 2006), facilitated by the availability of large language corpora.…”

Section: Looking Past the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quasiregularity and Its Discontents: The Legacy of the Past Tense Debate

Seidenberg

Plaut

2014

Cognitive Science

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Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic representations, relations between language and other phenomena such as reading and object recognition, the properties of artificial neural networks, and other topics. We examine the impact of the Rumelhart and McClelland model with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. It is not clear who "won" the debate. It is clear, however, that the core ideas that the model instantiated have been assimilated into many areas in the study of language, changing the focus of research from abstract characterizations of linguistic competence to an emphasis on the role of the statistical structure of language in acquisition and processing.

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Distributional structure in language: Contributions to noun–verb difficulty differences in infant word recognition

Cited by 15 publications

References 50 publications

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

Constructing a Proto-Lexicon: An Integrative View of Infant Language Development

Quasiregularity and Its Discontents: The Legacy of the Past Tense Debate

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