Time Course of Visual Attention in Statistical Learning of Words and Categories

Abstract Previous research indicates that adult learners are able to use co-occurrence information to learn word-to-object mappings and form object categories simultaneously. The current eyetracking study investigated the dynamics of attention allocation during concurrent statistical learning of words and categories. The results showed that the participants' learning performance was associated with the numbers of short and mid-length fixations generated during training. Moreover, the learners' patterns of attention allocation indicated online interaction and bi-directional bootstrapping between word and category learning processes

A new perspective on word order preferences: the availability of a lexicon triggers the use of SVO word order

Word orders are not distributed equally: SOV and SVO are the most prevalent among the world's languages. While there is a consensus that SOV might be the "default" order in human languages, the factors that trigger the preference for SVO are still a matter of debate. Here we provide a new perspective on word order preferences that emphasizes the role of a lexicon. We propose that while there is a tendency to favor SOV in the case of improvised communication, the exposure to a shared lexicon makes it possible to liberate sufficient cognitive resources to use syntax. Consequently SVO, the more efficient word order to express syntactic relations, emerges. To test this hypothesis, we taught Italian (SVO) and Persian (SOV) speakers a set of gestures and later asked them to describe simple events. Confirming our prediction, results showed that in both groups a consistent use of SVO emerged after acquiring a stable gesture repertoire

Is gesture-speech mismatch a general index of transitional knowledge?

When asked to explain their beliefs about a concept, some children produce gestures that convey different information from the information conveyed in their speech (i.e., gesture-speech mismatches). Moreover, it is precisely the children who produce a large proportion of gesture-speech mismatches in their explanations of a concept who are particularly "ready" to benefit from instruction in that concept, and thus may be considered to be in a transitional state with respect to the concept. Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986) and Perry, Church and Goldin-Meadow (1988) studied this phenomenon with respect to two different concepts at two different ages and found that gesture-speech mismatch reliability predicts readiness to learn in both domains. In an attempt to test further the generality of gesture-speech mismatch as an index of transitional knowledge, Stone, Webb, and Mahootian (1991) explored this phenomenon in a group of 15-year-olds working on a problem-solving task. On this task, however, gesture-speech mismatch was not found to predict transitional knowledge. We present here a theoretical framework, which makes it clear why we expect gesture-speech mismatch to be a general index of transitional knowledge, and then use this framework to motivate our methodological practices for establishing gesture-speech mismatch as a predictor of transitional knowledge. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that, if these practices had been used by Stone et al., they too would have found that gesture-speech mismatch predicts transitional knowledge.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30300/1/0000702.pd

A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the L1, L2 or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult L3 acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird’s eye view of the data tells us regarding competing theoretical accounts of L3 morphosyntactic transfer. Data couple together to suggest that some factors are more influential than others. As discussed, the systematic review transcends the field of adult multilingualism precisely because of what it reveals, as a prima facie example in behavioral research, in terms of how different types of methodological considerations impact the way data are interpreted to support or not particular claims

Near or far: the effect of spatial distance and vocabulary knowledge on word learning

The current study investigated the role of spatial distance in word learning. Two-year-old children saw three novel objects named while the objects were either in close proximity to each other or spatially separated. Children were then tested on their retention for the name-object associations. Keeping the objects spatially separated from each other during naming was associated with increased retention for children with larger vocabularies. Children with a lower vocabulary size demonstrated better retention if they saw objects in close proximity to each other during naming. This demonstrates that keeping a clear view of objects during naming improves word learning for children who have already learned many words, but keeping objects within close proximal range is better for children at earlier stages of vocabulary acquisition. The effect of distance is therefore not equal across varying vocabulary sizes. The influences of visual crowding, cognitive load, and vocabulary size on word learning are discussed

Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning

This document is the Accepted Manuscript Version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, Stephanie Strahm, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Soke word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning', Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 89, August 2016, pp. 55-67, doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.003. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 1 December 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

A Developmental Approach to Machine Learning?

Visual learning depends on both the algorithms and the training material. This essay considers the natural statistics of infant- and toddler-egocentric vision. These natural training sets for human visual object recognition are very different from the training data fed into machine vision systems. Rather than equal experiences with all kinds of things, toddlers experience extremely skewed distributions with many repeated occurrences of a very few things. And though highly variable when considered as a whole, individual views of things are experienced in a specific order – with slow, smooth visual changes moment-to-moment, and developmentally ordered transitions in scene content. We propose that the skewed, ordered, biased visual experiences of infants and toddlers are the training data that allow human learners to develop a way to recognize everything, both the pervasively present entities and the rarely encountered ones. The joint consideration of real-world statistics for learning by researchers of human and machine learning seems likely to bring advances in both disciplines

Sometimes it is better to know less: How known words influence referent selection and retention in 18 to 24-month-old children

Young children are surprisingly good word learners. Despite their relative lack of world knowledge and limited vocabularies, they consistently map novel words to novel referents and, at later ages, show retention of these new word–referent pairs. Prior work has implicated the use of mutual exclusivity constraints and novelty biases, which require that children use knowledge of well-known words to disambiguate uncertain naming situations. The current study, however, presents evidence that weaker vocabulary knowledge during the initial exposure to a new word may be better for retention of new mappings. Children aged 18–24 months selected referents for novel words in the context of foil stimuli that varied in their lexical strength and novelty: well-known items (e.g., shoe), just-learned weakly known items (e.g., wif), and completely novel items. Referent selection performance was significantly reduced on trials with weakly known foil items. Surprisingly, however, children subsequently showed above-chance retention for novel words mapped in the context of weakly known competitors compared with those mapped with strongly known competitors or with completely novel competitors. We discuss implications for our understanding of word learning constraints and how children use known words and novelty during word learning

The adoption of linguistic rules in native and non-native speakers:Evidence from a Wug task

Several recent theories have suggested that an increase in the number of non-native speakers in a language can lead to changes in morphological rules. We examine this experimentally by contrasting the performance of native and non-native English speakers in a simple Wug-task, showing that non-native speakers are significantly more likely to provide non-ed (i.e., irregular) past-tense forms for novel verbs than native speakers. Both groups are sensitive to sound similarities between new words and existing words (i.e., are more likely to provide irregular forms for novel words which sound similar to existing irregulars). Among both natives and non-natives, irregularizations are non-random; that is, rather than presenting as truly irregular inflectional strategies, they follow identifiable sub-rules present in the highly frequent set of irregular English verbs. Our results shed new light on how native and non-native learners can affect language structure