The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm

Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathryn; Cauley, Kathleen M.; Gordon, Laura

doi:10.1017/s030500090001271x

Cited by 522 publications

(376 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Gender was thus not included in the main analyses. Past literature has suggested that when testing young children on multiple trials, first-trial performance would be less biased by confounding factors (e.g., learning effect, fatigue, or perseveration) and thus the most convincing (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987;O'Sullivan, Mitchell, & Daehler, 2001;Schmitt & Anderson, 2002;Suddendorf, 2003). Therefore, each set of the analyses below examined children's performance (a) on the first trial and (b) over the four trials.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where Is the Real Cheese? Young Children's Ability to Discriminate Between Real and Pretend Acts

Lillard

2006

Child Development

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This study examined 2-to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend -real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food (Experiment 1) or point to the container with the real food (Experiments 2 and 3). 3-and 2.5-year-olds distinguished between the real and pretend acts based on behavioral cues alone. Two-year-olds chose the containers at random, but their spontaneous reactions suggested that they discriminated the real acts from pretense to some degree. Possible accounts for the discrepancy between the different behavioral measures are discussed.Imagine the following situation: A child is observing a person pretending to drink "loudly" from an empty cup. To make sense of this event, the child must interpret the pretend drinking as nonserious, and distinguish it from real drinking behavior. If the child failed to do so, her representations of what real drinking should be like would get confused. Whether, when, and how young children make sense of pretend events is an important scientific issue. Evidence thus far is mixed.Some research suggests that children are able to comprehend others' pretend actions by the age of 28 months, in the sense that they respond correctly to the pretend content (e.g., imaginary tea) and can imagine the outcome of others' make-believe acts (Harris &

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where Is the Real Cheese? Young Children's Ability to Discriminate Between Real and Pretend Acts

Lillard

2006

Child Development

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“…After training, infants were presented with a single word and two potential referents, the cross-trial correct referent and a foil. Past research (e.g., Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1997;Swingley & Aslin, 2000) shows that within this kind of preferential looking task, infants look longer at the labeled test object. Thus if infants have calculated the statistics appropriately, despite the uncertainty on individual learning trials, they should look longer at the correct referent of the word form.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics

2008

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First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children's rapid word learning have sought constraints on word-referent mappings. These constraints are thought to work by enabling learners to resolve the ambiguity inherent in any labeled scene to determine the speaker's intended referent at that moment. The present study shows that 12-and 14-month-old infants can resolve the uncertainty problem in another way, not by unambiguously deciding the referent in a single word-scene pairing, but by rapidly evaluating the statistical evidence across many individually ambiguous words and scenes.

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“…7 Note that 7% may be unnecessary; an even lower amount may be adequate if the raising of nite verbs is established before the two word stage, which could be con rmed by comprehension studies such as the preferential looking procedure (Golinkoff et al 1987).…”

Section: Frequency and Parameter Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three factors in language variation

Yang

2010

Lingua

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Universal Grammar and statistical generalization from linguistic data have almost always been invoked as mutually exclusive means of explaining child language acquisition. This papers show that such segregation is both conceptually unnecessary and empirically awed. We demonstrate the utility of general learning mechanisms in the acquisition of the core grammatical system through frequency effects in parameter setting, and develop an optimization-based model of productivity with applications to morphology and syntax in the periphery. These ndings in child language support the approach to the evolution of language that seeks connections between language and other cognitive systems, in particular the consequence of general principles of ef cient computation.

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The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm

Cited by 522 publications

References 27 publications

Where Is the Real Cheese? Young Children's Ability to Discriminate Between Real and Pretend Acts

Where Is the Real Cheese? Young Children's Ability to Discriminate Between Real and Pretend Acts

Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics

Three factors in language variation

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