Word learning mechanisms

He, Angela Xiaoxue; Arunachalam, Sudha

doi:10.1002/wcs.1435

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 153 publications

(181 reference statements)

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“…Still, this analysis indicates the syntactic frames in which children may produce, or, more critically, hear a verb used, are important for their vocabulary acquisition. A wealth of research indicates that not all word learning contexts are equal (see, e.g., He & Arunachalam, 2017, for review), and we hypothesize that ditransitive contexts are particularly challenging because of their syntactic complexity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children must also have efficient language-processing skills to quickly segment the unfamiliar verb from the ongoing speech stream, identify its morphosyntactic properties, and build a structure for the utterance in which it occurs. Conversely, when the processing demands of the utterance are high, children have difficulty using linguistic context to acquire verb meanings (He & Arunachalam, 2017;He, Kon, & Arunachalam, unpublished observations).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The syntactic and semantic features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies: a comparison of typically developing children and late talkers

2019

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Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in verb vocabulary. We conducted a retrospective analysis of parent-reported expressive vocabulary from the Language Development Survey (N = 564, N(LT) = 62) (Rescorla, 1989). Verbs were coded for the presence or absence of each syntactic and semantic feature. Binomial mixed-effects regressions revealed the effect of feature on children's knowledge and whether feature interacted with group classification. Our results revealed mostly similarities between late talkers and typically developing children. All children's vocabularies showed a bias against verbs that occur in ditransitive frames. One feature showed a difference between groups: late talkers showed a bias against manner verbs that typically developing children did not.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The syntactic and semantic features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies: a comparison of typically developing children and late talkers

2019

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“…This might have resulted in high error rates due to missing or incomplete mental representations of the presented words, as well as due to problems in quickly accessing lexical units from the mental lexicon in order to discriminate between words vs. pseudowords. As participants become older, their semantic network becomes more elaborated and interconnected ( He and Arunachalam, 2017 ) and therefore lexical units can be accessed faster. (2) The need to categorize information as positive or negative is highly relevant for adaptive processes and appears more frequently in daily life compared to the need to distinguish words from pseudowords.…”

Section: Summary and General Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

et al. 2017

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Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.

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“…Verb knowledge and syntactic knowledge must develop in tandem, each informing the other and together influencing the trajectory of language development (e.g., Gertner, Fisher, & Eisengart, 2006;L. R. Gleitman et al, 2005;Hadley et al, 2016;He & Arunachalam, 2017;Trueswell & Gleitman, 2007).…”

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An Eye-Tracking Study of Receptive Verb Knowledge in Toddlers

Valleau

Konishi

Golinkoff

et al. 2018

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose We examined receptive verb knowledge in 22- to 24-month-old toddlers with a dynamic video eye-tracking test. The primary goal of the study was to examine the utility of eye-gaze measures that are commonly used to study noun knowledge for studying verb knowledge. Method Forty typically developing toddlers participated. They viewed 2 videos side by side (e.g., girl clapping, same girl stretching) and were asked to find one of them (e.g., “Where is she clapping?”). Their eye-gaze, recorded by a Tobii T60XL eye-tracking system, was analyzed as a measure of their knowledge of the verb meanings. Noun trials were included as controls. We examined correlations between eye-gaze measures and score on the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Fenson et al., 1994), a standard parent report measure of expressive vocabulary to see how well various eye-gaze measures predicted CDI score. Results A common measure of knowledge—a 15% increase in looking time to the target video from a baseline phase to the test phase—did correlate with CDI score but operationalized differently for verbs than for nouns. A 2nd common measure, latency of 1st look to the target, correlated with CDI score for nouns, as in previous work, but did not for verbs. A 3rd measure, fixation density, correlated for both nouns and verbs, although the correlation went in different directions. Conclusions The dynamic nature of videos depicting verb knowledge results in differences in eye-gaze as compared to static images depicting nouns. An eye-tracking assessment of verb knowledge is worthwhile to develop. However, the particular dependent measures used may be different than those used for static images and nouns.

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Word learning mechanisms

Cited by 24 publications

References 153 publications

The syntactic and semantic features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies: a comparison of typically developing children and late talkers

The syntactic and semantic features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies: a comparison of typically developing children and late talkers

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

An Eye-Tracking Study of Receptive Verb Knowledge in Toddlers

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