Children’s preference for HAS and LOCATED relations: A word learning bias for noun–noun compounds

The present study investigates children’s bias when interpreting novel noun–noun compounds (e.g. kig donka) that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children’s understanding of modifier–head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a kig or a donka that is LOCATED near a kig) rather than a FOR relation (e.g. a donka that is used FOR kigs). In a forced-choice paradigm, two- and three-year-olds preferred interpretations with HAS/LOCATED relations, while five-year-olds and adults showed no preference for either interpretation. We discuss possible explanations\ud for this preference and its relation to another word learning bias that is based on perceptual features of the referent objects, i.e. the shape bias. We argue that children initially focus on a perceptual stability rather than a pure conceptual stability when interpreting the meaning of nouns

Storytelling with objects to explore digital archives

Finding media in archives is difficult while storytelling with photos can be fun and supports memory retrieval. Could the search for media become a natural part of the storytelling experience? This study investigates spatial interactions with objects as a means to encode information for retrieval while being embedded in the story flow. An experiment is carried out in which participants watch a short video and re-tell the story using cards each of which shows a character or object occurring in the video. Participants arrange the cards when telling the story. It is analyzed what information interactions with cards carry and how this information relates to the language of storytelling. Most participants align interactions with objects with the sentences of the story while some arrange the cards corresponding to the video scene. Spatial interactions with objects can carry information on their own or complemented by language

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure : distributional learning in a miniature language

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings

Dutch elementary school children’s attribution of meaning to written pseudowords

Grade two through six elementary school Dutch children were asked to perform a lexical decision task including 90 pseudowords constructed by changing one or two letters in a Dutch word. Subsequently, the children were asked about the meaning of pseudowords they had not crossed out and that they, apparently, had considered to be words. Multiple regression analyses on the lexical decision task showed that the older children were more hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword than by its orthographic neighbors. The younger children, in contrast, were less hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword and more hindered by its orthographic neighbors. Word length was a (small) predictor only for grade 6. Moreover, the answers of the children reflected that in their construction of meanings for the pseudowords they were hindered both by the morphemic structure and by the orthographic neighbors of the pseudowords

The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency. High-frequency forms are (ii) early acquired and (iii) prevent errors in contexts where they are the target, but also (iv) cause errors in contexts in which a competing lower-frequency form is the target. (v) Frequency effects interact with other factors (e.g. serial position, utterance length), and the patterning of these interactions is generally informative with regard to the nature of the learning mechanism. We conclude by arguing that any successful account of language acquisition, from whatever theoretical standpoint, must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion

Genetic influences in different aspects of language development: The etiology of language skills in 4.5 year-old twins

The genetic and environmental etiologies of diverse aspects of language ability and disability, including articulation, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and verbal memory, were investigated in a U.K. sample of 787 pairs of 4.5-year-old same-sex and opposite-sex twins. Moderate genetic influence was found for all aspects of language in the normal range. A similar pattern was found at the low end of the distribution with the exception of two receptive measures. Environmental influence was mainly due to nonshared factors, unique to the individual, with little influence from shared environment for most measures. Genetic and environmental influences on language ability and disability are quantitatively and qualitatively similar for males and females