7 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Pragmatic word learning in monolingual and bilingually exposed children
Humans are highly adaptable to a variety of challenging situations, as shown for example by increased echolocation abilities in the visually impaired (Schenkman & Nilsson, 2010). Multilingual input and interactions arguably create a particularly demanding environment, with added complexity and variation in the linguistic signal, a higher risk of communication failures and an increased amount of word forms to acquire.
Despite this, and a lesser ability to rely on mutual exclusivity, bilingual children are able to quickly acquire a similar, and often greater vocabulary than their monolingual peers (De Houwer, Bornstein, & Putnick, 2014; Umbel, Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1992). A range of studies investigating attention to socio-pragmatic speaker cues found increased reliance on speaker cues in bilinguals (Colunga, Brojde, & Ahmed, 2012; Yow & Markman, 2011a, 2015). However, since these studies involved ignoring another conflicting cue, the results could have been related to inhibitory skills or to better attention to speaker generally, rather than to pragmatic inference per se, which relies on reasoning about communicative intentions.
In five separate studies, we investigated the ability of a first (n=270, range=4;1- 6;2, mean age=5;3) and second (n=120, range=4;0-5;11, mean age=5;5) sample of monolingual and bilingually exposed children to use pragmatic cues to learn the meaning of a novel word in five different tasks where success could not be achieved by ignoring a salient cue. The tasks were: contrastive inference with prosodic stress, inference based on relative frequency of a referent, ostensive teaching of a subordinate category, ostensive teaching of an action word, and use of emotional affect. We found several developmental effects, and bilinguals to be more adult-like and to significantly outperform monolinguals (compared to a baseline control condition) in all tasks which involved reasoning about communicative intentions (or why the cue was provided, i.e., the first four tasks) but not when word referent mapping could be achieved without pragmatic reasoning (directly mapping emotional valence to referent valence, i.e., fifth task).
We conclude that this thesis provides evidence for differences in the processing of pragmatic cues by bilingual and monolingual children which are not due solely to better inhibitory skills or to a general sensitivity to social cues such as prosody, eye gaze and pointing, but to performing true pragmatic inference by reasoning about communicative intentions in the context of word learning. In addition, we believe a distinction needs to be made between using social cues and reasoning about intentions, which might help provide insights about separate developmental timelines for exerting different types of pragmatic competence, with early abilities demonstrated by the bilingually exposed, particularly in acquisition contexts
Not wacky vs. definitely wacky: A study of scalar adverbs in pretrained language models
Vector space models of word meaning all share the assumption that words
occurring in similar contexts have similar meanings. In such models, words that
are similar in their topical associations but differ in their logical force
tend to emerge as semantically close, creating well-known challenges for NLP
applications that involve logical reasoning. Modern pretrained language models,
such as BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-3 hold the promise of performing better on
logical tasks than classic static word embeddings. However, reports are mixed
about their success. In the current paper, we advance this discussion through a
systematic study of scalar adverbs, an under-explored class of words with
strong logical force. Using three different tasks, involving both naturalistic
social media data and constructed examples, we investigate the extent to which
BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2 and GPT-3 exhibit general, human-like, knowledge of these
common words. We ask: 1) Do the models distinguish amongst the three semantic
categories of MODALITY, FREQUENCY and DEGREE? 2) Do they have implicit
representations of full scales from maximally negative to maximally positive?
3) How do word frequency and contextual factors impact model performance? We
find that despite capturing some aspects of logical meaning, the models fall
far short of human performance.Comment: Published in BlackBoxNLP workshop, EMNLP 202
Recommended from our members
Bilingual children display comparative strength using prosodic cues for pragmatic word learning
Aims/objectives/research questions
Previous studies indicate differences in the way children who grow up with two languages use
socio-pragmatic cues to help them identify referents and learn new words, yet the nature of
these differences (executive control, better attention to social cues or pragmatic reasoning)
has not been investigated.
Design/methodology/approach
The present study examined 270 monolingual and bilingually exposed 4 to 6 year old children’s
performance in two tasks using different prosodic cues (contrastive stress and emotional affect)
for fast mapping. It avoids a design where children have to inhibit an irrelevant cue, which
would enhance the role of differences in executive control.
Data/analysis
We performed statistical analyses using a logistic regression mixed model.
Findings/Conclusions
The bilingually exposed group performed lower than monolinguals in a control condition
involving structural language (0.83 vs. 0.92). However, they performed on par with
monolinguals in a pragmatic condition when considering only semantically correct answers in
both groups (0.55 vs. 0.58), and even displayed significant comparative strength in the task
once control performance and demographic variables were taken into account. This effect
appeared when the task required reasoning about speaker’s communicative intentions
(contrastive stress) but not when children merely had to recognise a communicative cue
(emotional affect).
Originality
No study had so far investigated the socio-pragmatic abilities of bilingual children using a task
which did not require inhibiting an irrelevant cue.
Implications
These findings have implications for bilingual education and better understanding the impact
of being educated in two languages. We also draw attention to implications regarding the
existence of different types of pragmatic skills which may have differing developmental
timelines and rely on different sets of abilities.The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. The support of the following research funding bodies is gratefully acknowledged: Isabelle Lorge is grateful to the Wiener-Anspach Foundation and St John's College, Cambridge for MPhil and PhD studentships respectively, while Napoleon Katsos was supported by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, AH/N004671/1
Recommended from our members
Monolingual and bilingual children’s performance learning words from ostensive teaching
Children who grow up exposed to more than one language face a range of challenges and
developmental environments which differ from those of monolinguals. Recently, studies have
suggested that this may lead to differences in the development of pragmatic skills and
sensitivity to socio-pragmatic cues. We investigate whether bilingually exposed children are
able to make further use of these cues in an ostensive teaching setting for word learning in a
sample of 110 children aged 4 to 6 years old and find evidence that bilingual children do
perform significantly better in ostensive teaching settings when asked to use pragmatic cues
to derive the meaning of a novel word. We discuss implications for theories of pragmatics
and bilingual development.The support of the following research funding bodies is gratefully acknowledged: Isabelle Lorge is grateful to the Wiener-Anspach Foundation and St John's College, Cambridge for MPhil and PhD studentships respectively, while Napoleon Katsos was supported by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, AH/N004671/1