The associative structure of language: Contextual diversity in early word learning

Abstract

Previous studies demonstrated that statistical properties of adult generated free associates predict the order of early noun learning. We investigate an explanation for this phenomenon that we call the associative structure of language: early word learning may be driven in part by contextual diversity in the learning environment, with contextual diversity in caregiver speech correlating with the cue-target structure in adult free association norms. To test this, we examined the co-occurrence of words in caregiver speech from the CHILDES database and found that a word’s contextual diversity—the number of unique word types a word co-occurs with in caregiver speech—predicted the order of early word learning and was highly correlated with the number of unique associative cues for a given target word in adult free association norms. The associative structure of language was further supported by an analysis of the longitudinal development of early semantic networks (from 16 to 30 months) using contextual co-occurrence. This analysis supported two growth processes: The lure of the associates, in which the earliest learned words have more connections with known words, and preferential acquisition, in which the earliest learned words are the most contextually diverse in the learning environment. We further discuss the impact of word class (nouns, verbs, etc.) on these results.

The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child- versus adult-directed language

“…the negative definition), and the consistency needed to facilitate appropriate word usage in early language learners. Prior work investigating the statistical structure of child-directed language corpora found that diversity in word cooccurrence was a predictor of order of acquisition of children's earliest learned words (Hills et al, 2010). Words embedded in more linguistically diverse speech were learned earlier.…”

“…This structure is evaluated with respect to statistics traditionally associated with language acquisition (frequency and word repetitions) as well as attributes that may contribute to acquiring the meaning of children's earliest learned words, specifically ASSOCIATIVE STRUCTURE and CONTEXTUAL DIVERSITY (e.g. Hills, Maouene, Riordan & Smith, 2010). Associative structure is a measure of how often a word appears near its associates (as measured by adult free association norms ; see below) in natural language.…”

“…One way to measure associative relations is via free association norms, where one word is provided (the cue) and participants are asked to produce the first word that comes to mind (the target). Several studies have now shown that the number of cue words that produce a given target word in free association norms is correlated with children's age of acquisition of that target word (Hills, Maouene, Maouene, Sheya & Smith, 2009 ;Hills et al, 2010 ;Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005). In other words, if, in response to a broad range of cues, the word ball was produced more often as a target than zebra, then ball will tend to have an earlier age of acquisition.…”

“…Each of these measures was computed with respect to a constant window size that moved word-wise through the corpus. Based on previous work (Hills et al, 2010), the window size was set at 5 for the analyses presented here. Using a window size of 10 was found to produce similar results.…”

“…REPETITIONS indicate the probability that a word was repeated within the window. The CONTEXTUAL DIVERSITY of a word represents the number of unique word types that followed a word within the window per appearance of that word (see Hills et al, 2010).…”