Bilingual and Monolingual Children Attend to Different Cues When Learning New Words

The way in which children learn language can vary depending on their language environment. Previous work suggests that bilingual children may be more sensitive to pragmatic cues from a speaker when learning new words than monolingual children are. On the other hand, monolingual children may rely more heavily on object properties than bilingual children do. In this study we manipulate these two sources of information within the same paradigm, using eye gaze as a pragmatic cue and similarity along different dimensions as an object cue. In the crucial condition, object and pragmatic cues were inconsistent with each other. Our results showed that in this ambiguous condition monolingual children attend more to object property cues whereas bilingual children attend more to pragmatic cues. Control conditions showed that monolingual children were sensitive to eye gaze and bilingual children were sensitive to similarity by shape; it was only when the cues were inconsistent that children’s preference for one or the other cue was apparent. Our results suggest that children learn to weigh different cues depending on their relative informativeness in their environment

The Relationship between Parent's Comparisons of Nouns and Children's Noun Learning

Previous literature shows that language input is related to the language that children produce. Less is known about how the input provided to children relates to the way that they process language. In this study, this question was explored by looking at the relationships between children's word learning ability and the kinds of names provided by parents for objects. Whether these relationships varied with age and vocabulary size was also investigated. Children from five age groups at 12-, 16-, 20-, 24-, and 28-months participated in two types of tasks. First, to characterize the amount and type of labels used by parents, parents and children were videotaped in a naturalistic play in which they played with four sets of familiar and unfamiliar toys. Second, to characterize the children's ability to learn new labels, children were taught and tested on their learning of new words for familiar and unfamiliar objects either directly or indirectly (i.e. by inference). A factor analysis of parent's contrasts of multiple labels for the same object showed that the input was consistent with several factors suggested to influence children's successful learning of labels including the taxonomic level of the label, whether the name is for a whole object or a part, and whether the label is for a familiar or unfamiliar object. In the word learning task, children learned labels for familiar and unfamiliar objects equally well following direct teaching, but learned labels for unfamiliar objects easier following indirect teaching. The types of contrasts provided by parents were related to children's abilities to learn multiple names for objects such that parents' use of taxonomic contrasts was related to children learning more multiple names. Age and vocabulary size could not account for these relationships. These results suggest that the input provided by parents is related to several word learning principles put forth in previous literature. In addition, this input is related to children's performance in a word learning task. The implications for understanding several word learning processes are discussed

A bilingual advantage in 54-month-olds’ use of referential cues in fast mapping

Research has demonstrated a bilingual advantage in how young children use referential cues such as eye gaze and pointing gesture to locate an object or to categorize objects. This study investigated the use of referential cues (i.e., eye gaze) in fast mapping in three groups of children that differed in their language exposure. One hundred and seven 54-month-old children who were English monolinguals (n=29), English-Mandarin bilinguals (n=48), and English-Mandarin bilinguals with exposure to a third language (i.e., trilinguals, n=31) were assessed with a wordlearning task using two types of tests – a referent test and a mutual exclusivity test. During the task, following the gaze of an adult speaker was needed to be able to indicate the correct referent of a novel word at test. All three groups of children demonstrated successful word learning in explicit selection of and implicit looking time toward the target object during testing. However, bilingual and trilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers in both types of tests when they were asked to explicitly select the correct objects. These findings suggest positive effects of bilingualism on children’s use of referential cues in fast mapping

Guidelines for Designing Social Robots as Second Language Tutors

In recent years, it has been suggested that social robots have potential as tutors and educators for both children and adults. While robots have been shown to be effective in teaching knowledge and skill-based topics, we wish to explore how social robots can be used to tutor a second language to young children. As language learning relies on situated, grounded and social learning, in which interaction and repeated practice are central, social robots hold promise as educational tools for supporting second language learning. This paper surveys the developmental psychology of second language learning and suggests an agenda to study how core concepts of second language learning can be taught by a social robot. It suggests guidelines for designing robot tutors based on observations of second language learning in human–human scenarios, various technical aspects and early studies regarding the effectiveness of social robots as second language tutors