Korean- and English-speaking children use cross-situational information to learn novel predicate terms

Childers, Jane B.; Paik, Jae H.

doi:10.1017/s0305000908008891

Cited by 57 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…Developmental research indicates that comparison promotes relational learning in children as well as in adults (Childers & Paik, 2009;Christie & Gentner, 2010;Gentner, Anggoro, & Klibanoff, 2011;Gentner & Namy, 1999;Haryu, Imai, & Okada, 2011;Namy & Gentner, 2002). For example, Gentner, Loewenstein, and Hung (2007) taught 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children to identify novel object parts; children were shown a novel standard figure, told that "this one has a blicket," and asked to say which of two other figures also had a "blicket."…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Kurtz

Gentner

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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The ability to detect anomalies in perceived stimuli is critical to a broad range of cognitive tasks, yet acquiring this ability often requires lengthy practice. In this research, we asked whether findings from research on analogical comparison can be used to aid in the acquisition of perceptual expertise. Building on findings that comparison can facilitate the detection of differences, the present research addressed two questions: (1) Does having an alignable comparison standard improve performance on a difficult detection task? (2) Can such comparison experience improve subsequent detection performance on single anomalous targets? Across 3 experiments, university undergraduates were asked to find an anomalous bone in drawings of animal skeletons. Target items including an anomaly were presented either alone or with a correct standard. Furthermore, to evaluate the impact of ease of alignment, the correct standard was presented either mirror-reversed (low alignable) or regular (high alignable). Results showed increased accuracy when a comparison standard was present and further gains when the standard was more easily alignable. In Experiment 3, we used a between-subjects design to reveal that advance comparison (as opposed to single-item training) led to improved detection of anomalies in subsequent novel examples presented as isolated targets. We conclude that the availability of a standard and ease of alignment promote encoding and processing. Furthermore, comparison-based learning confers an ongoing advantage even without standards for comparison. Therefore, task performance in application areas requiring detection of nonobvious anomalies can be improved by providing alignable standards next to targets or in advance training.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Kurtz

Gentner

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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“…For example, in structural alignment models of similarity matching in non-linguistic domains (see Gentner, 1983Gentner, , 1989, the process of analogy required for generalisation is facilitated when the instances being compared are similar on any dimension. In language acquisition, crosssituational (and thus cross-constructional) similarity matching is highly likely to play a role in the acquisition of the meaning of novel words and, may in fact, be required in order for the Competing constructions 27 child to converge on the correct meaning (Childers & Paik, 2009). We simply extend this mechanism to the acquisition of form-meaning mappings.…”

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Rowland¹,

Noble²,

Chan³

2014

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

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Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both prepositional and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation -Welsh -to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-yearolds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.Competing constructions 3

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“…Comparison is particularly effective at highlighting the relational information necessary for learning verbs and other relational terms (Childers in press;Childers and Paik 2009;Gentner and Namy 2004;Haryu, Imai, and Okada in press;Pruden et al 2008). For example, Childers (in press) found that 2 2 1 -year-olds were better at learning novel verbs if they compared multiple instances that varied in their specific details.…”

Section: How Analogical Processing Supports Language Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutual bootstrapping between language and analogical processing

Gentner¹,

Christie²

2010

Lang. cogn.

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Korean- and English-speaking children use cross-situational information to learn novel predicate terms

Cited by 57 publications

References 39 publications

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Mutual bootstrapping between language and analogical processing

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