The effects of perceptual similarity and category membership on early word-referent identification

Arias‐Trejo, Natalia; Plunkett, Kim

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.10.002

Cited by 65 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Regarding early semantics, Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (18) find that both visual similarity and category membership contribute to semantic competition: For toddlers, understanding "shoe" in the context of a boot and a shoe was harder than when shoe appeared with a hat or bin instead. Thus, even in seasoned word learners, certain visual contexts make it harder to ascertain a spoken word's referent.…”

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confidence: 99%

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Bergelson

Aslin

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

145

177

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Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-moolds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253-3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-moolds for a hallmark of the mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine whether properties of the home environment that have been linked with lexical knowledge in older children are detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home measures from the same infants. We find evidence for cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns, infants looked significantly more at named target images when the competitor images were semantically unrelated (e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g., milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun "copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon from the outset.word learning | lexicon | cognitive development | language acquisition | environmental effects T o learn words, infants integrate their linguistic experienceswith word forms and the conceptual categories to which they refer. They do this fast: A growing literature demonstrates that, by around 6 mo, infants have begun understanding nouns (1-5), suggesting they form word-referent links from their environment in the first half-year.The speech-sound learning trajectory in year one is relatively well-established (6): Infants' language-specific sensitivity emerges around 6 mo for vowels, and 12 mo for consonants (7,8). Indeed, by 12 mo, infants reveal robust phonetic representations for common words (9-11), and fine-grained knowledge of native language speech-sound combinatorics (12). Before this, their sensitivity to phonemic and talker-specific differences can be fragile (3,13).In contrast, early meaning is understudied: It's not clear what makes the first words infants understand learnable, or what aspects of meaning infants initially represent. This is partly because meaning components are not straightforward. While phonetic features (e.g., voicing) let us readily quantify speechsound differences, characterizing meaning is harder; consider describing or comparing how "dog" and "log" sound versus what they mean. While toddlers are sensitive to visual similarity, shape, and semantic category (14-17), little is known about nascent semantic representations.Regarding early semantics, Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (18) find that both visual similarity and category membership contribute to semantic competition: For toddlers, understanding "shoe" in the context of a boot and a shoe was harder than when shoe appeared with a hat or bin instead. Thus, even in seasoned word learners, certa...

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confidence: 99%

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Bergelson

Aslin

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

145

177

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“…Young children are also sensitive to the similarity between spoken referents and pictured objects (e.g., Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010;Styles & Plunkett, 2009;Torkildsen et al, 2007; see also Mani & Plunkett, 2010). Recent studies have demonstrated that language-mediated shifts of attention to only partially matching referents in the visual field are even present in children as young as 3 years of age.…”

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confidence: 99%

Toddlers' Language-Mediated Visual Search: They Need not have the Words for It

Johnson

McQueen

Huettig

2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.

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“…Depending on the age and/or vocabulary size of the participants, it is common practice to adjust the onset of the post-naming phase to account for variation in gaze shift latency (Fernald et al, 2008). In addition, many factors can influence the processing time of the target and distracter pictures, starting with the nature and complexity of the auditory stimulus, the visual properties of the stimuli (e.g., Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010), or the type of distracter (familiar vs. unfamiliar; White & Morgan, 2008). Therefore a time window fixed a priori may not be the most accurate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This time window usually ends at 2000 ms, as it is generally considered that later looking behaviour is no longer related to the processing of the auditory stimulus. When plots of the time course for proportions of looks to the target are included, usually at end of the result section (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010;Fernald et al, 2008;Swingley & Aslin, 2000), the time window can then be justified a posteriori, the visual inspection confirming that roughly 2000 ms after word onset, looking behaviour resumes to chance level (that is, equal looks to the target and the distracter). However, since latency is a function of at least age (Zangl & Fernald, 2007) and vocabulary size (Fernald et al, 2006), the whole looking behaviour can also be influenced by task difficulty.…”

Section: Methods Of Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, as demonstrated by Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (2010), choosing a distracter image which is perceptually close to the target image (e.g., a balloon paired with an egg) can result in uninvited interference effects so that 18-to 24-month-olds fail to identify the target image. The consequences of other methodological choices (such as the use of a fixation point) on the robustness of the experimental effects are largely unknown.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A methodological investigation of the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm: Methods of analyses, picture selection and data rejection criteria

Luche

Durrant

Poltrock

et al. 2015

Infant Behavior and Development

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The Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm provides a sensitive measure of a child's online word comprehension. To complement existing recommendations (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008), the present study evaluates the impact of experimental noise generated by two aspects of the visual stimuli on the robustness of familiar word recognition with and without mispronunciations: the presence of a central fixation point and the level of visual noise in the pictures (as measured by luminance saliency). Twenty-month-old infants were presented with a classic word recognition IPL procedure in 3 conditions: without a fixation stimulus (No Fixation - noisiest condition), with a fixation stimulus before trial onset (Fixation, intermediate), and with a fixation stimulus, a neutral background and equally salient images (Fixation Plus - least noisy). Data were systematically analyzed considering a range of data selection criteria and dependent variables (proportion of looking time towards the target, longest look, and time-course analysis). Critically, the expected pronunciation and naming interaction was only found in the Fixation Plus condition. We discuss the impact of data selection criteria and the dependent variable choice on the modulation of these effects across the different conditions.

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The effects of perceptual similarity and category membership on early word-referent identification

Cited by 65 publications

References 49 publications

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Toddlers' Language-Mediated Visual Search: They Need not have the Words for It

A methodological investigation of the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm: Methods of analyses, picture selection and data rejection criteria

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