Inhibitory Control Predicts Grammatical Ability

We present evidence that individual variation in grammatical ability can be predicted by individual variation in inhibitory control. We tested 81 5-year-olds using two classic tests from linguistics and psychology (Past Tense and the Stroop). Inhibitory control was a better predicator of grammatical ability than either vocabulary or age. Our explanation is that giving the correct response in both tests requires using a common cognitive capacity to inhibit unwanted competition. The implications are that understanding the developmental trajectory of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental trajectory of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control

Vocabulary and grammar development in young learners of English as an additional language

Internationally, an increasing number of children learn English as an additional language (EAL). Children with EAL grow up in an environment where English is the majority language but are exposed to a different, minority language at home. Despite the increase in the number of EAL learners around the world, comparatively little is known about the development of their vocabulary and grammar at preschool age. Furthermore, the use of different methods in EAL studies can make research evidence difficult to summarize. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar development at preschool, drawing from studies that have used standardized tests, experimental tasks, or both. This review indicates that few studies have focused on preschool children with EAL. These suggest that, at the earliest stages of language learning, EAL learners generally know fewer words and acquire grammatical constructions at a slower pace than their English monolingual peers. These differences often persist throughout development, risking a negative impact on EAL learners’ academic attainment in an English-only school environment. Thus, this chapter also includes some suggestions for practice that could help children with EAL develop their vocabulary and grammar knowledge during and after preschool

When Learners Surpass Their Models: Mathematical Modeling of Learning from an Inconsistent Source

It has been reported in the literature that both adults and children can, to a different degree, modify and regularize the often-inconsistent linguistic input they receive. We present a new algorithm to model and investigate the learning process of a learner mastering a set of (grammatical or lexical) forms from an inconsistent source. The algorithm is related to reinforcement learning and drift-diffusion models of decision making, and possesses several psychologically relevant properties such as fidelity, robustness, discounting, and computational simplicity. It demonstrates how a learner can successfully learn from or even surpass its imperfect source. We use the data collected by Singleton and Newport (Cognit Psychol 49(4):370-407, 2004) on the performance of a 7-year-boy Simon, who mastered the American Sign Language (ASL) by learning it from his parents, both of whom were imperfect speakers of ASL. We show that the algorithm possesses a frequency boosting property, whereby the frequency of the most common form of the source is increased by the learner. We also explain several key features of Simon's ASL. © 2014 Society for Mathematical Biology

Connectionist dissociations, confounding factors and modularity

Although much has been written on this subject, there still seems to be considerable confusion in the literature concerning dissociations, double dissociations and what they really mean, especially when connectionist or neural network models are involved. In this paper I attempt to clarify matters by looking at the subject from the point of view of patterns of learning rates in neural network models.

Young Toddlers’ Word Comprehension Is Flexible and Efficient

Much of what is known about word recognition in toddlers comes from eyetracking studies. Here we show that the speed and facility with which children recognize words, as revealed in such studies, cannot be attributed to a task-specific, closed-set strategy; rather, children’s gaze to referents of spoken nouns reflects successful search of the lexicon. Toddlers’ spoken word comprehension was examined in the context of pictures that had two possible names (such as a cup of juice which could be called “cup” or “juice”) and pictures that had only one likely name for toddlers (such as “apple”), using a visual world eye-tracking task and a picture-labeling task (n = 77, mean age, 21 months). Toddlers were just as fast and accurate in fixating named pictures with two likely names as pictures with one. If toddlers do name pictures to themselves, the name provides no apparent benefit in word recognition, because there is no cost to understanding an alternative lexical construal of the picture. In toddlers, as in adults, spoken words rapidly evoke their referents

The past tense inflection project (PTIP): Speeded past tense inflections, imageability ratings, and past tense consistency measures for 2,200 verbs

10.3758/s13428-012-0240-yBehavior Research Methods451151-15