Toddlers Activate Lexical Semantic Knowledge in the Absence of Visual Referents: Evidence from Auditory Priming

Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children\u27s lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. In Experiment 1, looking times to a repeating spoken word stimulus (e.g., kitty-kitty-kitty) were shorter for trials preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., dog-dog-dog) than trials preceded by an unrelated word (e.g., juice-juice-juice). Experiment 2 yielded similar results using a method in which pairs of words were presented on the same trial. The studies provide evidence that young children activate of lexical semantic knowledge, and critically, that they do so in the absence of visual referents or sentence contexts. Auditory lexical priming is a promising technique for studying the development and structure of semantic knowledge in young children

Acquisition and Representation of Grammatical Categories: Grammatical Gender in a Connectionist Network

In traditional models of language production grammatical categories are represented as abstract features independent of semantics and phonology. An alternative view is proposed where syntactic categories emerge as a higher-order regularity from semantic and phonological properties of words. The proposal was tested using grammatical gender in Serbian, a south Slavic language with rich morphology. Semantic and phonological correlates of gender are described using a corpus of 1221 Serbian nouns. A PDP network was trained to produce the same words based on distributed semantic representation as input and distributed phonological representation as output, and with no explicit representation of grammatical gender. Upon successful learning of the training corpus, generalization was explored using test corpora designed to capture semantic and phonological properties of different genders. The findings suggest that grammatical gender, as other syntactic categories, may be viewed as emerging through coherent co-variation of semantic and phonological properties of words during learning

Multiple code activation in word recognition: Evidence from rhyme monitoring

Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) reported that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more rapidly than dissimilar rhymes in a rhyme monitoring task with auditory stimulus presentation. The present experiments investigated the hypothesis that these results were due to a rhyme production-frequency bias in favor of similar rhymes that was present in their materials. In three experiments, subjects monitored short word lists for the word that rhymed with a cue presented prior to each list. All stimuli were presented auditorily. Cue-target rhyme production frequency was equated for orthographically similar and dissimilar rhymes. Similar rhymes were detected more rapidly in all three experiments, indicating that orthographic information was accessed in auditory word recognition. The results suggest that multiple codes are automatically accessed in word recognition. This entails a reinterpretation of phonological "recoding" in visual word recognition

Cohomological characterizations of projective spaces and hyperquadrics

We confirm Beauville's conjecture that claims that if the p-th exterior power of the tangent bundle of a smooth projective variety contains the p-th power of an ample line bundle, then the variety is either the projective space or the p-dimensional quadric hypersurface.Comment: Added Lemma 2.8 and slightly changed proof of Lemma 6.2 to make them apply for torsion-free sheaves and not only to vector bundle

Impact of dialect use on a basic component of learning to read

Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development. Behavioral data show that use of the alternative pronunciations of words in different dialects affects reading aloud in developing readers, with larger effects for children who use more African American English. Mechanisms underlying this effect were explored with a computational model, investigating factors affecting reading acquisition. The results indicate that the achievement gap may be due in part to differences in task complexity: children whose home and school dialects differ are at greater risk for reading difficulties because tasks such as learning to decode are more complex for them

Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword-picture matching posttest was used to assess learning of nonword meaning, and a spelling posttest was used to assess learning of nonword orthography. Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography. Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword-referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in posttests was related to children's reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography