Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences

Cassani, Giovanni; Grimm, Robert; Daelemans, Walter; Gillis, Steven

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209449

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Van Severen, et al 2013), theories of acquisition (e.g. Cassani, Grimm, Daelemans & Gillis, 2018), the role of the input (e.g. Odijk & Gillis, 2022) and in terms of the current paper many studies of childhood deafness and language development (e.g.…”

Section: Prefacementioning

confidence: 81%

Remarks on the medical and social models of research in deafness and language development

Morgan¹

2022

SSTP

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Research on deaf children’s language development has a long and complex history. Work is motivated by seemingly incompatible models of what deafness means. On the one hand, the dominant medical model documents hearing loss and spoken language deficits. Research contributes to continuing improvements in spoken language outcomes following neo-natal screening and early cochlear implants. On the other hand, the smaller number of researchers looking at deafness and language development in the social model have championed the diversity of deaf children, their rights to learn signed languages and be educated in bilingual schools. This paper covers a selection of research studies on deafness and language development coming from both the medical and social models.The main objective of the paper is to offer some remarks concerning a set of standpoints taken by researchers which require more careful discussion in order to further thefield. It concludes with a suggestion for how the two diverging models could convergemore. The proposal is to focus attention on the factors which lead to high quality earlycommunicative interactions rather than access to words or signs.

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Section: Prefacementioning

confidence: 81%

Remarks on the medical and social models of research in deafness and language development

Morgan¹

2022

SSTP

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“…Thirdly, both variability and predictability seem to play a role in language processing. These concepts could be inversely related: a highly variable context leads to easier categorization but prevents the learner from predicting future words, and vice versa (Cassani et al, 2018). Variability seems to facilitate word learning in children with DLD and help category formation by making relevant properties salient (Aguilar et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preserved category-based inferences for word learning in school-aged children with developmental language disorder

Dauvister

Jemel

Maillart

2021

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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Word learning difficulties are often found in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Lexical patterns of difficulties appear to be well described in the context of DLD but very little research focuses on their underlying causes. Word learning is known to be an inference-based process, constrained by categorization, which helps the extension of new words to unfamiliar referents and situations. These processes appear integrated in Bayesian models of cognition, which supposes that learning relies on an inductive inference process that recruits prior knowledge and principles of statistical learning (detection of regularities). Taken together, these mechanisms remain underexplored in DLD. Our study aims to define whether children with DLD can draw inductive inferences in a word learning context using categorization. Twenty children with DLD (between 6;0 and 12;6), and 20 languagematched and 16 age-matched controls were exposed to a word learning task where they were given exemplars of objects associated with pseudo-words. The objects belonged to six categories spread across three hierarchical levels. For each item, the children chose which one(s), among a set of test objects from the same categories, could be labelled the same way (word extension). Results showed that school-aged children with DLD could extend new words to broader categories as well as their typically developing (TD) peers. Nevertheless, none of the DLD or TD children showed a specification of their categorization of familiar instances that referred to more restricted instances. Our study suggests preserved abilities in using conceptual knowledge in order to learn new words, which could be used as a compensative strategy in the context of therapy. Further studies are needed to investigate this ability in more complex learning contexts.

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Distributional Lattices as a Model for Discovering Syntactic Categories in Child-Directed Speech

Zhu

Clark

2022

J Psycholinguist Res

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Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences

Cited by 6 publications

References 81 publications

Remarks on the medical and social models of research in deafness and language development

Remarks on the medical and social models of research in deafness and language development

Preserved category-based inferences for word learning in school-aged children with developmental language disorder

Distributional Lattices as a Model for Discovering Syntactic Categories in Child-Directed Speech

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