Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some…not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the National Academy of Sciences via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.160134111

Advancing our understanding of the link between statistical learning and language acquisition: The need for longitudinal data

Mastery of language can be a struggle for some children. Amongst those that succeed in achieving this feat there is variability in proficiency. Cognitive scientists remain intrigued by this variation. A now substantial body of research suggests that language acquisition is underpinned by a child’s capacity for statistical learning (SL). Moreover, a growing body of research has demonstrated that variability in SL is associated with variability in language proficiency. Yet, there is a striking lack of longitudinal data. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation of whether a capacity for SL in young children is, in fact, associated with language proficiency in subsequent years. Here we review key studies that have led to the need for this longitudinal research. Advancing the language acquisition debate via longitudinal research has the potential to transform our understanding of typical development as well as disorders such as autism, specific language impairment, and dyslexia

Representativity : weak interpretations of definite plural noun phrases

1.1 The Romans built this bridge. What does it take to make 1.1 true? Surely we do not require that every single Roman participated in the building of the bridge. In other words, we do not view 1.1. as equivalent to 1.2. It seems more appropriate to translate The Romans in 1.1 with the existential quantifier, i.e. as 1.3. Still, sentences with definite plural noun phrases have traditionally been represented with the universal quantifier. This treatment is appropriate for some sentences such as 1.4 below, but apparently not for all cases. 1.2.All the Romans built this bridge. 1.3 Some Romans built this bridge. 1.4 The soldiers slept. This thesis is concerned with representativity, the phenomenon exemplified by 1.1. We have a representative interpretation of a sentence when: -- it contains a definite plural noun phrase -- some member or subset of the noun phrase denotation satisfies the predicate -- the rest of the individuals in the noun phrase denotation do not satisfy the predicate -- the predicate is used to characterize the whole group referred to by the noun phrase Representative predication is quite common in natural language use, but has not received much attention in the semantic and pragmatic literature. The first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the phenomenon is the Ph. D. thesis of Young Eun Yoon Kang, Weak and Strong Interpretations of Quantifiers and Definite Plural Noun Phrases (1994), which was followed up by an article in Natural Language Semantics (1996). Although Kang’s work has been commented on by a number of linguists (cf. Krifka (1996), Brisson (1998), Bech and Sauerland (2000) and Geurts (2002)), only Brisson (1998) undertakes a thorough treatment of the issues Kang raise. The present thesis is an attempt to account for the semantic and pragmatic factors which make representativity possible, and how these factors can be incorporated into a formal framework. In the first part of the thesis, we place representativity in the semantic landscape of related notions such as collectivity, cumulativity and genericity. Further, we review the theory presented in Kang (1994, 1996), and compare it to a number of other theories which have approached representativity from different angles. In particular, we compare Kang’s framework with that of Brisson (1998). Brisson claims that representativity is just a sub-phenomenon of a broader notion, nonmaximality. In the present thesis we show that representativity and nonmaximality are essentially different phenomena, and that Brisson’s framework cannot capture representativity. Then we pass on to specifying our own semantic and pragmatic prerequisites for the representative interpretation. We conclude that this can be best be done by distinguishing three types of representativity which involve different semantic and pragmatic factors. Finally, we give a formal account of the representative interpretation in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)

Statistical learning under incidental versus intentional conditions

Statistical learning (SL) studies have shown that participants are able to extract regularities in input they are exposed to without any instruction to do so. This and other findings, such as the fact that participants are often unable to verbalize their acquired knowledge, suggest that SL can occur implicitly or incidentally. Interestingly, several studies using the related paradigms of artificial grammar learning and serial response time tasks have shown that explicit instructions can aid learning under certain conditions. Within the SL literature, however, very few studies have contrasted incidental and intentional learning conditions. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of having prior knowledge of the statistical regularities in the input when undertaking a task of visual sequential SL. Specifically, we compared the degree of SL exhibited by participants who were informed (intentional group) versus those who were uninformed (incidental group) about the presence of embedded triplets within a familiarization stream. Somewhat surprisingly, our results revealed that there were no statistically significant differences (and only a small effect size) in the amount of SL exhibited between the intentional versus the incidental groups. We discuss the ways in which this result can be interpreted and suggest that short presentation times for stimuli in the familiarization stream in our study may have limited the opportunity for explicit learning. This suggestion is in line with recent research revealing a statistically significant difference (and a large effect size) between intentional versus incidental groups using a very similar visual sequential SL task, but with longer presentation times. Finally, we outline a number of directions for future research

Substantial gains in word learning ability between 20 and 24 months: A longitudinal ERP study

This longitudinal ERP study investigated changes in children’s ability to map novel words to novel objects during the dynamic period of vocabulary growth between 20 and 24 months. During this four-month period the children on average tripled their productive vocabulary, an increase which was coupled with changes in the N400 effect to pseudoword-referent associations. Moreover, productive vocabulary size was related to the dynamics of semantic processing during novel word learning. In children with large productive vocabularies, the N400 amplitude was linearly reduced during the five experimental learning trials, consistent with the repetition effect typically seen in adults, while in children with smaller vocabularies the N400 attenuation did not appear until the end of the learning phase. Vocabulary size was related only to modulation of the N400 to pseudowords, not to real words. These findings demonstrate a remarkable development of fast mapping ability between 20 and 24 months

Event-related potentials during word mapping to object shape predict toddlers’ vocabulary size

What role does attention to different object properties play in early vocabulary development? This longitudinal study using event-related potentials in combination with behavioral measures investigated 20- and 24-month-olds’ (n = 38; n = 34; overlapping n = 24) ability to use object shape and object part information in word-object mapping. The N400 component was used to measure semantic priming by images containing shape or detail information. At 20 months, the N400 to words primed by object shape varied in topography and amplitude depending on vocabulary size, and these differences predicted productive vocabulary size at 24 months. At 24 months, when most of the children had vocabularies of several hundred words, the relation between vocabulary size and the N400 effect in a shape context was weaker. Detached object parts did not function as word primes regardless of age or vocabulary size, although the part-objects were identified behaviorally. The behavioral measure, however, also showed relatively poor recognition of the part-objects compared to the shape-objects. These three findings provide new support for the link between shape recognition and early vocabulary development

Visual event-related potentials to novel objects predict rapid word learning ability in 20-month-olds

In an event-related potentials (ERP) study, twenty-month-old children (n = 37) were presented with pseudowords to map to novel object referents in five presentations. Quicker attenuation of the visual Negative central component (Nc) to novel objects predicted a larger difference in N400 amplitude between congruous and incongruous presentations of pseudowords at test. Furthermore, better initial recognition of familiar objects (Nc difference between familiar and novel objects) predicted the strength of the N400 incongruity effect to the verbal labels of these real objects. This study presents novel evidence for a link between efficient visual processing of objects and word learning ability. © 2016 Kristina Borgström, Janne von Koss Torkildsen, and Magnus Lindgren