Young Children's Use of Contrast in Word Learning: The Case of Proper Names

Recent research has established that contrast can exert a powerful effect on early word learning. This study examined the role of contrast in young children's ability to learn proper names. Preschoolers heard a novel word for an unfamiliar stuffed animal in the presence of a second stuffed animal of either the same or a different kind. Children received contrastive information indicating that the word did not apply to the second animal. Children were more likely to interpret the word as a proper name if the second animal belonged to the same kind as the target than if it belonged to a different kind. Children did not appear to make a proper name interpretation in a control condition in which the second animal was not present, providing no contrastive information. The results reveal the strength of within-kind contrastive information to foster children's acquisition of proper names, highlighting the potency of comparison processes in early word learning

Preschoolers' use of form class cues to learn descriptive proper names

This study examined 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers' ability to learn proper names containing familiar descriptions. Children saw a novel creature with a familiar property (it was red) and heard either an adjective ("This is a red one") or a descriptive proper name ("This is Mr. Red"). The creature was then transformed, losing the property (e.g., it became green). Children had to extend the word to either the transformed original creature or a new creature bearing the original property (another red creature). Children, especially 4-year-olds, extended the adjective to the new creature but were significantly more likely to extend the proper name to the original creature. Lexical form class cues provided potent information about word meaning, directing preschoolers to reinterpret familiar descriptive terms (adjectives) as homophonic terms designating unique individuals (proper names)

Higher-order semantic structures in an African Grey parrot\u27s vocalizations: Evidence from the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL) model

Previous research has described the significant role that social interaction plays in both the acquisition and use of speech by parrots. The current study analyzed the speech of one home-raised African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) across three different social contexts: owner interacting with parrot in the same room, owner and parrot interacting out of view in adjacent rooms, and parrot home alone. The purpose was to determine the extent to which the subject’s speech reflected an understanding of the contextual substitutability (e.g., the word street can be substituted in context for the word road) of the vocalizations that comprised the units in her repertoire (i.e., global co-occurrence of repertoire units; Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 30:188–198, 1998; Lund and Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 28:203–208, 1996). This was accomplished via the human language model hyperspace analog to language (HAL). HAL is contextually driven and bootstraps language “rules” from input without human intervention. Because HAL does not require human tutelage, it provided an objective measure to empirically examine the parrot’s vocalizations. Results indicated that the subject’s vocalization patterns did contain global co-occurrence. The presence of this quality in this nonhuman’s speech may be strongly indicative of higher-order cognitive skills