Extended Statistical Learning as an account for slow vocabulary growth*

Abstract

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic validity of this conclusion. The lexicons (production, not recognition) of 208 French-speaking two-year-old children were coded for ND and WF. Regression revealed that ND and WF together predicted 62% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 53% and 9% of that variance respectively. Epiphenomenal findings were ruled out by comparison of simulated data sets with the actual data. A generalized Mann-Whitney test showed that children with small vocabularies had significantly higher ND values and significantly lower WF values than children with large vocabularies. An EXTENDED STATISTICAL LEARNING theory is proposed to account for the findings.

Are Young Children With Cochlear Implants Sensitive to the Statistics of Words in the Ambient Spoken Language?

“…That is, as vocabulary size increased, neighborhood density decreased and word frequency increased. Those findings were replicated in French-speaking children (Stokes, Kern, & Dos Santos, 2012) and in Danish-speaking children (Stokes, Blese, Basbøll, & Lambertsen, 2012). …”

Lexical Characteristics of Expressive Vocabulary in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Stokes, Kern, et al (2012) proposed a theory of Extended Statistical Learning (ExSL) to account for the slowed vocabulary development of toddlers who are late to talk based on the observation that those children with smaller vocabularies produce words that sound like many other ambient words (i.e., differ from many other words by only a single phoneme; Stokes, 2010; Stokes, Kern, et al, 2012). That is, ExSL was proposed to account for findings related to neighborhood density.…”

“…Thus, the general argument put forth by Stokes, Kern, et al (2012) was that children with smaller vocabularies are slow to acquire the distributional regularities of language input that support lexical learning. They suggested that it is these children who are also slow to relax the constraints on lexical learning afforded by statistical learning strategies.…”

“…Recent research has drawn attention to ways in which lexical characteristics relate to vocabulary acquisition. The current study tested the hypothesis that lexical characteristics account for variability in vocabulary size of young children with ASD, applying the Extended Statistical Learning theory of vocabulary delay in late talkers (Stokes, Kern, & dos Santos, 2012) to toddlers with ASD. …”

How children explore the phonological network in child-directed speech: A survival analysis of children’s first word productions

“…Storkel (2009, see also 2004) analyzed the timing of nouns’ appearance in children’s (aged 16–30 months) productive lexicons, based on the proportion of children of each age reported by their parents to have produced the nouns on the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Fenson et al, 1994). Short, high degree words were known by more children and acquired at an earlier age (but see Stokes, 2010; Stokes, Kern, & Dos Santos,2012), but the strength of the effect decreased steadily after age 2., This finding does not conclusively demonstrate a degree effect, as Storkel used a composite score of length and degree, but it yields some support for predicting a positive effect of degree here. There is also evidence for substantial variability in children’s sensitivity to degree (Maekawa & Storkel, 2006).…”