Why <i>Choo‐Choo</i> Is Better Than <i>Train</i>: The Role of Register‐Specific Words in Early Vocabulary Growth

“…For example, clap.your.hands had a higher trigram frequency than take.your.hands, but clap and take were matched in frequency and so were clap.your and take.your. The items were constructed based on naturalistic British English infant-directed speech from the Nuffield corpus (McGillion, Pine, Herbert, & Matthews, 2017) and the Edinburgh corpus (Ota, Davies-Jenkins, & Skarabela, 2018). Combined, they yielded a dataset of 363,081 words.…”

Section: Trigram Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases

et al. 2021

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Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is still not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N=36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency:'clap your hands' vs. low frequency: 'take your hands'). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.

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“…One of the few studies to directly test the relation between the influence of various lexical input features on lexical development found no significant contributions from the occurrence of onomatopoeia or iconic words on subsequent lexical growth in 47 English-learning infants from 9 to 21 months (Ota et al, 2018).The study found that not iconic words, but diminutives and reduplication in the input (whether in iconic or non-iconic words) were associated with vocabulary growth. However, it should be pointed out that in many languages, the types of expressive and evaluative morphology represented by reduplication and diminutives overwhelmingly co-occur with iconic vocabulary (Mattes, 2018), suggesting it may be artificial to dissociate them.…”

Section: The Acquisition Of Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 77%

Iconicity in word learning and beyond: A critical review

Nielsen¹,

Dingemanse²

2018

Preprint

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Interest in iconicity (the resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning) is in the midst of a resurgence, and a prominent focus in the field has been the possible role of iconicity in language learning. Here we critically review theory and empirical findings in this domain. We distinguish local learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the learning of those items) and general learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the later learning of non-iconic items or systems). We find that evidence for local learning enhancement is quite strong, though not as clear cut as it is often described and based on a limited sample of languages. Despite common claims about broader facilitatory effects of iconicity on learning, we find that current evidence for general learning enhancement is lacking. We suggest a number of productive avenues for future research and specify what types of evidence would be required to show a role for iconicity in general learning enhancement. We also review evidence for functions of iconicity beyond word learning: iconicity enhances comprehension by providing complementary representations, supports communication about sensory imagery, and expresses affective meanings. Even if learning benefits may be modest or cross-linguistically varied, on balance, iconicity emerges as a vital aspect of language.

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Why Choo‐Choo Is Better Than Train: The Role of Register‐Specific Words in Early Vocabulary Growth

Cited by 23 publications

References 62 publications

Symbolic play provides a fertile context for language development

Symbolic play provides a fertile context for language development

‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases

Iconicity in word learning and beyond: A critical review

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