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WHAT'S IN A WORD? ON THE CHILD'S ACQUISITION OF SEMANTICS IN HIS FIRST LANGUAGE11This research was supported in part by NSF Grant GS-1880 to the Language Universals Project, Stanford University, and in part by NSF Grant GS-30040 to the author.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on of the knowledge that one has to have about a word to use it appropriately. From the developmental point of view, what the child knows about the meaning of a word needs to be found in addition to the way in which this knowledge changes during the language acquisition process. The semantic feature hypothesis assumed that the meanings of words are made up of features or components of meaning and proposed that children learn word meanings gradually by adding more features to their lexical entries. The general predictions made by this theory have been shown to be remarkably consistent with data from several different sources in the literature on children's language. The theory contains a number of lacunae that future work will have to fill. For example, there is no account of the internal structure or lack of it in the child's earliest lexical entries. To study language acquisition properly, semantics cannot be ignored, for it is essential to know what the children means by what they says, and to know how they understand what they hear.
... Young children's semantic representations appear to go through a refinement process (Bergelson & Aslin, 2017;Clark, 1973Clark, , 1978Clark, , 1987Hendrickson et al., 2017;McGregor et al., 2002;Seston et al., 2009). Children's initial representation of the word cookie, for example, is imprecise and may include other types of categorically related foods, such as crackers and cake. ...
... These findings are directly in line with research showing that children's semantic representations go through a narrowing process (Bergelson & Aslin, 2017;Clark, 1973Clark, , 1978Clark, , 1987Hendrickson et al., 2017;McGregor et al., 2002;Seston et al., 2009). A child may start out with limited understanding of a vocabulary word, but as they experience more and more language exposure, their knowledge of the item becomes more sophisticated. ...
In gaining word knowledge, children’s semantic representations are initially imprecise before becoming gradually refined. We developed and tested a framework for a digital receptive vocabulary assessment that captured varied levels of representation as children learn words. At pre-test and post-test, children selected one of four images to match a word’s meaning: a correct target, a conceptually-related foil, a thematically-related foil, and a phonologically-similar foil. We expected that selecting a conceptually related foil would indicate that the word is understood at a deeper level than selecting a phonologically similar foil. Indeed, selection of phonological foils decreased from pre- to post-test, while selection of more advanced thematic and conceptual foils increased. These results demonstrate that this assessment tool probed semantic knowledge that might be characterized as intermediate word knowledge. The current paper presents a novel and sensitive way to capture the incremental process of word learning. Applications for vocabulary interventions are discussed.
... Consistent with the fast mapping assumptions of ME (Markman & Wachtel, 1988) and N3C (Golinkoff et al., 1992), the idea often associated with fast mapping that children can learn word meanings through contrast is supported by Clark's (1973Clark's ( , 1983aClark's ( , 1983bClark's ( , 1987 principle of contrast. Clark's principle of contrast states that wherever there is a difference in form in a language, there is a difference in meaning and that it is "by virtue of this property that language maintains its usefulness as a medium of communication" (Clark, 1987, p. 1). ...
The robust vocabularies acquired by neurotypical children are impossible to account for by direct instruction alone, and as such incidental acquisition must play a role. A variety of explanations for the source of this exponential language growth have been put forth by theorists across related disciplines. We provide our general reflections on interactions that exist among the possible sources of incidental language acquisition that have been put forth by both behavior-analytic and cognitive perspectives. We first consider the behavior-analytic perspectives of bidirectional naming (BiN), stimulus equivalence (SE), and relational frame theory (RFT). Next, we consider the cognitive perspective of fast mapping. We also provide comparisons between the behavior-analytic principle of exclusionary performance, and the cognitive principles of mutual exclusivity and the principle of contrast as additional sources for incidental acquisition of novel object–word labels and meanings. We reflect on points of contact and departure between these cross-disciplinary theories of human language and cognition.
... For example, in addition to multiple layers of social information, children can rely on semantic and syntactic features of the utterances as cues to meaning (E. V. Clark, 1973;Gleitman, 1990). Across development, children learn to recruit these different sources of information and integrate them. ...
Language is learned in complex social settings where listeners must reconstruct speakers' intended meanings from context. To navigate this challenge, children can use pragmatic reasoning to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. A critical challenge for pragmatic reasoning is that it requires integrating multiple information sources, which have typically been studied separately. Here we study this integration process. First, we experimentally isolate two sources of pragmatic information: expectations about informative communication and common ground. Next, we use a probabilistic model of conversational reasoning to formalize how these information sources should be combined and how this process might develop. We use this model to generate quantitative predictions, which we test against new experimental data from 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 243) and adults (N = 694). Results show close alignment between model predictions and data. Furthermore, the model provided a better explanation of the data compared with simpler alternative models assuming that participants selectively ignore one information source. This work integrates distinct sets of findings regarding information sources for early language learning and suggests that pragmatic reasoning models can provide a quantitative framework for understanding developmental changes in language learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... The main hypothesis for learning a new language states that the process begins by imitation of the sounds spoken by native speakers of the language (Speidel and Nelson, 2012). The association of semantics with speech sounds constitutes the next phase of learning (Clark, 1973), which further develops to sentence formation and syntax/grammar learning. These processes may not be sequential and may be interleaved with each other. ...
The event-related potential (ERP) of electroencephalography (EEG) signals has been well studied in the case of native language speech comprehension using semantically matched and mis-matched end-words. The presence of semantic incongruity in the audio stimulus elicits a N400 component in the ERP waveform. However, it is unclear whether the semantic dissimilarity effects in ERP also appear for foreign language words that were learned in a rapid language learning task. In this study, we introduced the semantics of Japanese words to subjects who had no prior exposure to Japanese language. Following this language learning task, we performed ERP analysis using English sentences of semantically matched and mis-matched nature where the end-words were replaced with their Japanese counterparts. The ERP analysis revealed that, even with a short learning cycle, the semantically matched and mis-matched end-words elicited different EEG patterns (similar to the native language case). However, the patterns seen for the newly learnt word stimuli showed the presence of P600 component (delayed and opposite in polarity to those seen in the known language). A topographical analysis revealed that P600 responses were pre-dominantly observed in the parietal region and in the left hemisphere. The absence of N400 component in this rapid learning task can be considered as evidence for its association with long-term memory processing. Further, the ERP waveform for the Japanese end-words, prior to semantic learning, showed a P3a component owing to the subject's reaction to a novel stimulus. These differences were more pronounced in the centro-parietal scalp electrodes.
... Researchers were concerned with how children advanced from single-word utterances to their first two-word combinations, and the order in which they added inflections and other grammatical morphemes (e.g., Brown, 1973). Later studies began to look at lexical semantics and at how this affected the acquisition of increasingly complex syntactic constructions (e.g., E. V. Clark, 1973Clark, , 1993Lieven et al., 1997Lieven et al., , 2003. Only a handful of studies looked at children's early uses of gestures and words (e.g., Bates, 1976;Carter, 1979;Caselli, 1983). ...
... Organized semantic representations, linking words and the concepts to which they refer by relevant within-and acrossdomain distinctions, are believed to be a critical aspect of human cognition (Clark, 1973;Bjorklund and Jacobs, 1985;Gobbo and Chi, 1986). As such, there is a large interest in understanding how semantic structure develops with experience and learning, and how organized semantic representations influence other cognitive processes. ...
Remote data collection procedures can strengthen developmental science by addressing current limitations to in-person data collection and helping recruit more diverse and larger samples of participants. Thus, remote data collection opens an opportunity for more equitable and more replicable developmental science. However, it remains an open question whether remote data collection procedures with children participants produce results comparable to those obtained using in-person data collection. This knowledge is critical to integrate results across studies using different data collection procedures. We developed novel web-based versions of two tasks that have been used in prior work with 4-6-year-old children and recruited children who were participating in a virtual enrichment program. We report the first successful remote replication of two key experimental effects that speak to the emergence of structured semantic representations (N = 52) and their role in inferential reasoning (N = 40). We discuss the implications of these findings for using remote data collection with children participants, for maintaining research collaborations with community settings, and for strengthening methodological practices in developmental science.
In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross‐linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to front and behind , followed by left and right . This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by different locative terms. An additional possibility is that children may be delayed in expressing certain spatial meanings partly due to difficulties in discovering the mappings between locative terms in speech and spatial relation they express. We investigate cognitive and mapping difficulties in the domain of spatial language by comparing how children map spatial meanings onto speech versus visually motivated forms in co‐speech gesture across different spatial relations. Twenty‐four 8‐year‐old and 23 adult native Turkish‐speakers described four‐picture displays where the target picture depicted in‐on, front‐behind, or left‐right relations between objects. As the complexity of spatial relations increased, children were more likely to rely on gestures as opposed to speech to informatively express the spatial relation. Adults overwhelmingly relied on speech to informatively express the spatial relation, and this did not change across the complexity of spatial relations. Nevertheless, even when spatial expressions in both speech and co‐speech gesture were considered, children lagged behind adults when expressing the most complex left‐right relations. These findings suggest that cognitive development and mapping difficulties introduced by the modality of expressions interact in shaping the development of spatial language.
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how aspects of form and meaning influence the retention of grammatical information. Native (N = 64) and non-native (N = 63) German speakers read sentence pairs. The second sentence was presented after 12–16 intervening sentences and was either identical to the first sentence or changed in one grammatical feature (tense, number). For both types of grammatical alternations, we controlled for formal and meaning aspects involved in their processing. Longer reading times in the changed condition compared to the identical condition indicated retention of the grammatical information conveyed in the first sentence. Non-native participants showed stronger retention effects when salient formal changes were involved, whereas native speakers were more sensitive to changes based on conceptual/meaning differences. Our study provides novel insights into which components of grammatical features drive their retention in the memory of non-native and native readers.
A successful lexicographic semantic description characterizes the concepts that occur in establishing the meaning of a listeme by modelling what the competent native-like speaker of the language knows. Because concepts can only be identified to another human through the medium of a natural language, the metalanguage used in the semantic definition of a natural language expression in the object language will always be equivalent to the natural language expression through which that metalanguage is interpreted. The metalanguage of a semantic theory is a demonstrably rational abstract model developed by applying the analyst’s experience and intuitions to inferences drawn from occurrences of actual speech events. Each sense of a listeme is characterized by a description of the salient properties of its typical denotatum. To most effectively implement this project in conceptual engineering is to capture every possible sense of the listeme using metalanguage that is at the same time precise, comprehensive, and succinct. A review of several proposed lexicon/dictionary entries for the listeme cup reveals lacunae that are rectified in a decision procedure whose output characterizes the relevant sense of the input listeme using natural language and the procedural constructs/commands &, XOR, IF, ELSE, ELIF, GOTO, OUTPUT, TENABLE, NEXT ITEM. The resulting lexicographic semantic description satisfies the specified success condition. Establishing the characteristics of metalanguage is crucial to the proper investigation of conceptual engineering.
As theoretical models become more complex, there is more pressure to use less time-consuming methods generally, and shorter scales specifically. Although reliability is related to scale length, reliability cutoffs are easily met, even in very short scales, by writing or selecting items that are worded in nearly identical ways, that is, grammatical redundancy. However, grammatical redundancy increases reliability at the cost of domain sampling—a crucial early step in scale construction and one of the two pillars of content validity. Without it, a scale cannot capture the intended construct. The purpose of this paper is to provide scale developers (and shorteners) with a process for quantifying, identifying, and reducing grammatical redundancy without compromising conceptual redundancy, a process that we label ConGRe. Our process involves indices from the linguistics literature that can be used to guide decisions during item writing, that is, prior to data collection. We examine their relation to more traditional psychometric indicators and provide a set of benchmarks. Overall, we demonstrate that it is possible to reduce grammatical redundancy, thus avoiding scale deficiency, without sacrificing traditional psychometric properties.
The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One‐hundred‐and‐forty children in England (36–107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger , longer , smaller , shorter , or taller than an experimenter's. Children were most successful with words that refer to size increases. Younger children were less accurate with smaller and shorter , often building bigger structures. The dimensional aspect of taller emerged gradually. These findings suggest that children's interpretation of the meaning of size comparison words changes and becomes more precise across development.
The most authoritative resource for students and researchers, The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language has been thoroughly updated and extended. Enhancements include new chapters on the acquisition of words, processing deficits in children with specific language impairments, and language in children with Williams syndrome, new authors for the bilingualism and autism chapters, a refocused discourse chapter on written narratives, and a new section on reading and reading disorders, cementing the handbook's position as the best study of the subject available. In a wide-ranging survey, language development is traced from prelinguistic infancy to adolescence in typical and atypical contexts; the material is intuitively grouped into six thematic sections, enabling readers to easily find specific in-depth information. With topics as varied as statistical learning, bilingualism, and the neurobiology of reading disorders, this multidisciplinary Handbook is an essential reference for students and researchers in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, speech pathology, education and anthropology.
Two major trends on children’s skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children’s capability to comprehend novel metaphors (‘X is a Y’) in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection task, while also tracking their gaze. Further, given recent findings on the development of metonymy comprehension suggesting a U-shaped developmental curve for this phenomenon (Köder & Falkum, 2020), we aimed to determine the shape of the developmental trajectory of novel metaphor comprehension, and to explore how both types of data (picture selection and gaze behavior) relate to each other. Our results suggest a linear developmental trajectory with 6-year-olds significantly succeeding in picture selection and consistently looking at the metaphorical target even after question onset.
Universal human values play the role of supra-individual regulators in society, reflected both in the scientific public consciousness and in the ideas of ordinary people. According to V.K. Shokhin, values represent the fundamental components of personality. They are not only a powerful personal resource, but also a link between the individual and society, performing a socializing function and influencing the consciousness of generations. This monograph is based on the assumption that the reality perceived by a person in the process of activity is reflected in his consciousness through temporal, spatial and causal connections between phenomena and objects. The model of linguistic consciousness is a set of associations that help cultural speakers form an idea of a fragment of the world.
Since at least the time of Apollonius Dyscolus (The syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus, Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1981), On Syntax I: 78 it has been recognized that proper names express idia poiotēs literally “individual quality”, loosely “a unique identifier”. But on closer inspection they do more. I do not subscribe to the check-list account of proper names of Frege (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100:25–50, 1892), Russell (Mind 14:479–493, 1905), Searle (Mind 67:166–173, 1958), Strawson (Individuals: an essay on descriptive metaphysics, Methuen, London, 1959), preferring the Kripke (Semantics of natural language, Reidel, Dordrecht, 253–355, 1972) notion of the name as rigid designator. I argue that proper names need to be included in a lexicon because they have certain lexical properties. Proper names for animates typically indicate the gender of the referent (cf. Searle in Mind 67:166–173, 1958), which is why transgender folk usually change their forename, and why John washed herself sounds anomalous/ungrammatical. Moreover, names often indicate the ethnic origin of the referent, compare the names Agyeman, Chen, Cohen, Françoise, Giancarlo, Kwame, Lyudmila, Mei, Nguyen, Papadopoulos, Shevardnadze, Tomiko, Wojciech. Although it is often claimed that names uniquely identify, they only do so in limited contexts: There are numerous individuals named Jesus or Elizabeth Taylor. Names are linked with roles (not merely gender roles): Robert Zimmerman may name the same person as Bob Dylan, but it was only the latter that is properly the creator of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. It is Marilyn Monroe and not Norma Jeane Mortenson who appeared in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’. A man may be Bill to his friends but William as a legal person. Names may vary across languages: London = Londres, = Shevardnadze. Names vary across-time: Byzantion ⇒ Kōnstantinoupolis ⇒ Kostantiniyye ⇒ İstanbul. Naming, Kripke’s ‘baptism’, is influenced by the role of the name-bearer in a certain spatio-temporal context. There is semantic content to a name but there is also pragmatic (encyclopaedic) information that cannot be ignored, cf. My boss is a little Hitler. I extend the discussion to all kinds of names, proper names, natural kind names, common names.
I propose a way to manage all these characteristics of names, beginning with the suggestion that lexicon entries supply one means of access to encyclopaedia entries, and that the lexicon forms a part of an encyclopaedia.
Plain Language Summary
This study investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of three types of linguistic terms, namely, aspect markers, temporal adverbs, and temporal nouns, to express temporal ideas. The factors that affected their acquisition were also explored. Temporal expressions were extracted from natural language samples obtained from 82 Mandarin-speaking children aged two to five. The older children used more varieties of temporal terms in general, and they were more capable of using multiple temporal terms in single utterances. Moreover, temporal terms expressing more remote and specific time concepts were acquired later than those expressing proximate and generic time concepts. It was found that language content (measured as abstractness of meanings) and language form (measured as linguistic complexity) interacted to shape the acquisition of various temporal terms. Moreover, the acquisition of different linguistic terms to express temporal ideas was affected by the children’s progress in the acquisition of more advanced time concepts. These findings provided enhanced evidence of the acquisition patterns of temporal terms by young children. A two-dimensional content-form interactive framework of language acquisition was further proposed, which can be applied to predict the acquisition patterns of other linguistic terms in the language assessment of typically developing children as well as those with language disorders. The relatively small group size and reliance on natural language samples instead of structural contexts in the current study potentially limit the findings. Future studies should recruit a wider age range of participants and use both natural and structural language elicitation procedures to replicate the findings.
Business Process Management (BPM) needs to be adjusted quickly and flexibly to cope with the dynamics of the business environment, so the demand for the incorporation of agility has reached BPM. To contribute to the theoretical consolidation of Agile BPM, it is necessary to develop a conceptualization for the term, that is, to describe the essential attributes for its understanding. Communicating the meaning of the concept in reduced words occurs through the definition, so the main objective of this study is to develop a scientific definition for Agile BPM. This study was performed in three phases. First, a systematic literature review was conducted to investigate how the scientific literature has addressed Agile BPM. Next, a deductive analysis was performed to conceptualize Agile BPM. In the third phase, a consultation with experts was conducted to refine the conceptual view and critique a tentative definition, preceded by judges' analysis to consolidate the definition. As a result, the concept of Agile BPM was elaborated, and based on the reduction of this conceptualization, a scientific definition was presented which describes that Agile BPM is “the promotion of BPM in which practitioners stimulate change quickly and flexibly in order to meet organizational demands with compliance and provide a better customer experience”. There is a pioneering spirit in the present study regarding the deliberate conceptualization of Agile BPM, which provides the basis for discussion of the topic, and helps scientific dissemination through a definition, contributing to the development of a theory of Agile BPM.
Understanding how humans acquire or learn a language has been controversial in various disciplines. Most vigorously, psychologists and linguists have been struggling with models that would represent the processing and development of language. The current literature carries many models, making it formidable for the researchers to heed the appropriate approach. A review of the most salient models could provide enlightenment on such bewildering concerns. To this aim, this systematic review paper compares the most reliable and practical models and discusses their salience. By highlighting the requirements of a functional model to be partially universal, we raise issues for a more compelling model that would encompass areas of first and second language acquisition.
For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, they need only have represented enough about the meanings of the words used by another speaker to understand what is intended in context on a particular occasion. Reliance on partial meanings is common in both children and adults. More detailed, shared, representations of word meanings for a domain depend on acquiring additional knowledge about that domain and its contents.
Previous research demonstrates that children delineate more nuanced color boundaries with increased exposure to their native language. As socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with differences in the amount of language input children receive, this study attempts to extend previous research by asking how both age (age 3 vs 5) and SES (under-resourced vs advantaged) might impact color name acquisition of preschool children. The results confirm the findings of previous research, showing that older children labeled the color continuum more accurately than did younger participants. In addition, we found that while SES did not make a difference in how children labeled the continuum using basic color terms (e.g. blue), basic color terms with achromatic modifiers (e.g. light blue), and compound terms (e.g. blueish-green), 5-year-olds from more advantaged economic environments used significantly more non-basic color terms (e.g. turquoise) compared to their counterparts from under-resourced environments. We suggest that, as children hear more non-basic terms, these world-to-word mappings become solidified, and exposure to such labels may contribute to the timing of when children can map those terms to the color continuum.
How does the representation of naturalistic life events change with age? Here we analyzed fMRI data from 414 children and adolescents (5 - 19 years) as they watched a narrative movie. In addition to changes in the degree of inter-subject correlation (ISC) with age in sensory and medial parietal regions, we used a novel measure (between-group ISC) to reveal age-related shifts in the responses across the majority of the neocortex. Over the course of development, brain responses became more discretized into stable and coherent events and shifted earlier in time to anticipate upcoming perceived event transitions, measured behaviorally in an age-matched sample. However, hippocampal responses to event boundaries actually decreased with age, suggesting a shifting division of labor between episodic encoding processes and schematic event representations between the ages of 5 and 19.
This study explores how primary school children develop their meta-cognitive knowledge and vocabulary knowledge and how both types of knowledge are dynamically correlated from 1st to 4th grade. The longitudinal sample included 426 first-grade students (M = 6.6 years, SD = .51; 50.2% boys, 49.7% girls) from five public primary schools in China. A set of tests on metacognitive knowledge and vocabulary knowledge were administered four times over four years. The one-on-one-basis metacognitive knowledge test was based on students' explanations about cognitive activities; the vocabulary knowledge test focused on students' breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Latent growth curve modelling was used to study developmental change. Results showed that participants' metacognitive knowledge and vocabulary knowledge improved from 1st to 4th grade but not in a cumulative fashion. Participants' level of metacognitive knowledge was strongly associated with their vocabulary knowledge throughout the selected school years. The development of vocabulary knowledge breadth lagged behind vocabulary knowledge depth during the study period. These findings shed light on primary school students' development of metacognitive knowledge and vocabulary knowledge.
Similes require two different pragmatic skills: appreciating the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature (e.g., "Lucy is like a parrot" normally implies that Lucy is not a parrot), but previous studies overlooked this second skill. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 48; ages 3-5) understood "X is like a Y" as an expression of similarity. In Experiment 2 (N = 99; ages 3-6, 13) and Experiment 3 (N = 201; ages 3-5 and adults), participants received metaphors ("Lucy is a parrot") or similes ("Lucy is like a parrot") as clues to select one of three images (a parrot, a girl or a parrot-looking girl). An early developmental trend revealed that 3-year-olds started deriving the implicature "X is not a Y," whereas 5-year-olds performed like adults.
Within cognitive and developmental psychology, it is commonly argued that perception is the basis for object concepts. According to this view, sensory experiences would translate into concepts thanks to the recognition, correlation and integration of physical attributes. Once attributes are integrated into general patterns, subjects would become able to parse objects into categories. In this article, we critically review the three epistemological perspectives according to which it can be claimed that object concepts depend on perception: state non-conceptualism, content non-conceptualism , and content conceptualism . We show that the three perspectives have problems that make perception inadequate as a conceptual basis. We suggest that the inquiry about the origin and development of object concepts can benefit from a pragmatic perspective that considers objects’ cultural functions as a conceptual foundation. We address this possibility from the theoretical framework of the pragmatics of the object , considering the importance of objects’ functional permanence .
Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in monolingual versus bilingual children. We collected free naming data for pictures of nearly 200 household containers from 499 Belgian children, aged 5 to 14, and adults, raised with either (a) only French, (b) only Dutch, or (c) both French and Dutch. Both monolingual and bilingual 5-year olds produced largely shared naming patterns, and for both groups, naming patterns became more language-specific and also more consistent within-language over time. However, monolinguals and bilinguals diverged in some aspects of their developmental profiles. Monolinguals started to introduce language-specificities to their naming pattern beginning at age 8, but differentiation between languages did not emerge for bilinguals until age 12. Consensus on name choice increased across ages for both groups, but bilinguals showed more consensus at all ages, reflecting smaller vocabularies and less differentiation. Thus monolingual and bilingual children follow a similar trajectory from shared to language-specific patterns of word use, but bilinguals differentiate later and for only some words. This study demonstrates that a transition from shared to language-specific naming is a key aspect of later lexical development, but the developmental course differs in detail between monolingual and bilingual children.
Children produce their first words between the ages of one and one‐and‐a‐half. They add new words as they gain experience from interaction with adults who talk about new objects, draw attention to their properties, and link the new words to familiar ones the children already know.
Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than front but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a semantic misanalysis explanation, early meanings for front and back are non-adult (non-geometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, pragmatic inference explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of front and back; the profile of back can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared to visibility. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of front/back by 3-and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used back more frequently than front in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the front/back asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults' production of spatial language cross-linguistically.
Aisha, age 24 months, sees her older sister trip over a toy and squeals “Kiki fell!” At 30 months her doll falls behind the couch, and she asks “Where dolly falled?” At 48 months her computer mouse falls behind a stack of computer manuals under the desk, and she asks “Where did that silly mouse fall?” Both her world and her sentences are getting more complex as she gets older, but there is one oddity: the past‐tense verb fell shows a U‐shaped developmental pattern. Aisha gets it right at 24 months, wrong at 30 months, and right again at 48 months. Why?
As children accumulate words, they build up semantic domains. In doing this, they start to link the meanings of words, depending on how they are related to each other. They rely on conceptual representations of objects and events, and on how adults talk about objects and events. Adults typically provide information along with new-word offers: facts about class membership, parts and properties, motion, sound, and function provide a basis for semantic relations. Semantic domains built up early include many general domains as well as some domains of intense interest (e.g., dinosaurs or cars), also elaborated with parental support. As children learn more words, they structure each domain and link new terms to ones they already know.
This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly produce locative utterances lacking overt prepositions, with the rate of preposition omission decreasing significantly by age 3. Furthermore, our results suggest that phonologically strong and semantically unambiguous locative items appear earlier in Norwegian children's utterances than their phonologically weak and semantically ambiguous counterparts. This conclusion is confirmed by a corpus study. We argue that our results are best captured by the Underspecified P Hypothesis (UPH; Mitrofanova, 2017), which assumes that, at early stages of grammatical development, the underlying structure of locative utterances is underspecified, with more complex functional representations emerging gradually based on the input. This approach predicts that the rate of acquisition in the domain of locative PPs should be influenced by the lexical properties of individual language-specific grammatical elements (such as frequency, morphological complexity, phonological salience, or semantic ambiguity). Our data from child Norwegian show that this prediction is borne out. Specifically, the results of our study suggest that phonologically more salient and semantically unambiguous items are mastered earlier than their ambiguous and phonologically less salient counterparts, despite the higher frequency of the latter in the input (Clahsen et al. , 1996).
We propose that concepts exist along a continuum of abstraction, from highly concrete to highly abstract, and we explore a critical kind of abstract category: relational abstractions. We argue that these relational categories emerge gradually from concrete concepts through a process of progressive analogical abstraction that renders their common structure more salient. This account is supported by recent findings in historical linguistics, language acquisition and neuroscience. We suggest that analogical abstraction provides a major route for the development of abstractions in language and cognition.
Semantic knowledge (or semantic memory) is knowledge we have about the world. For example, we know that knives are typically sharp, made of metal, and that they are tools used for cutting. To what kinds of experiences do we owe such knowledge? Most work has stressed the role of direct sensory and motor experiences. Another kind of experience, considerably less well understood, is our experience with language. We review two ways of thinking about the relationship between language and semantic knowledge: (i) language as mapping onto independently-acquired concepts, and (ii) language as a set of cues to meaning. We highlight some problems with the words-as-mappings view, and argue in favour of the words-as-cues alternative. We then review some surprising ways that language impacts semantic knowledge, and discuss how distributional semantics models can help us better understand its role. We argue that language has an abstracting effect on knowledge, helping to go beyond concrete experiences which are more characteristic of perception and action. We conclude by describing several promising directions for future research.
This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example, the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.
Research has indicated that during sentence processing, French native speakers predominantly rely upon lexico-semantic cues (i.e., animacy) while native speakers of English rely upon syntactic cues (i.e., word order). The present study examined sentence production in L1 French/L2 English and L1 English/L2 French sequential bilinguals. Participants used animate and inanimate entities as sentence subjects while describing motion events represented by static pictures. To test a gradual change in animacy cue weighting in second-language sequential bilinguals with different proficiency levels were included. Sentence production of sequential bilinguals was compared against that of simultaneous bilinguals. The results indicated an overall preference for the use of animate subjects for both languages at all proficiency levels. The effect of animacy was stronger for English L2 than French L2 while it did not differ between languages in simultaneous bilinguals. Evidence for potential change in the animacy-cue weighting was only observed for English L2.
Previous studies have shown bilingually and monolingually developing children to differ in their sensitivity to referential pragmatic deixis in challenging tasks, with bilinguals exhibiting a higher sensitivity. The learning of adjectives is particularly challenging, but has rarely been investigated in bilingual children. In the present study we presented a pragmatic cue supporting the learning of novel adjectives to 32 Spanish–German bilingual and 28 German monolingual 5-year-olds. The children's responses to a descriptive hand gesture highlighting an object's property were measured behaviorally using a forced choice task and neurophysiologically through functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). While no group differences emerged on the behavioral level, fNIRS revealed a higher activation in bilingual than monolingual children in the vicinity of the posterior part of the right superior temporal sulcus (STS). This result supports the prominent role of the STS in processing pragmatic gestures and suggests heightened pragmatic sensitivity for bilingual children.
Children produce their first words anywhere between 12 months and 24 months of age. And they add steadily to their vocabulary from then on, at a rate estimated at around nine words a day up to age six (Clark, 2009).
Keywords:
first language acquisition;
pragmatics;
interactionist language studies;
vocabulary
Lexical development refers to the rules that children use to understand, produce, and create the meaning of individual words and their combined relationship to one another.
In ▶ Kapitel 1 werden Grundlagen aus kognitiver Psychologie und Wahrnehmungspsychologie sowie aus der (kognitiven) Linguistik zusammengefasst. Der Erwerb von Bedeutungen und phonologischen Wortformen wird erläutert. Unterschiedliche (modulare, interaktiv-konnektionistische und hybride) Lexikonmodelle werden als Vorstellungshilfen zum Aufbau und zur Funktionsweise des Lexikons exemplarisch dargestellt und besprochen.
The current study examines how gestural representations of motion events arise from linguistic expressions in Farsi, as this language offers many unique characteristics; exhibiting characteristics of both Talmy’s satellite- and verb-framed languages. We examined native Farsi speakers’ speech and gestures in describing 20 motion events. We focused on two motion event components: path (trajectory of motion like up) and manner (how the action is performed like jumping). Analyses of syntactic packaging and clause-level correspondence between speech and gesture, as well as parallel ordering of speech and gesture sequences were, for the most part, in support of models that posit a close correspondence between speech-gesture production. However, while Farsi speakers described both path and manner in their speech, gesture was markedly impoverished for manner, suggesting constraints on the one-to-one mapping between linguistic and gestural expressions.
Attempts to reconcile the ease with which young children naturally learn everyday categories with their frequent difficulty in acquiring artificial categories in the laboratory have taken different forms. Kemler Nelson suggested that one reason for the discrepancy may be that many everyday object categories have a family-resemblance structure that can be learned by means of a holistic mode of processing While Ward et al. have recently questioned this account of why children learn family-resemblance categories easily, conclusions based on their laboratory data fail to provide a good explanation of the real-world case. Accordingly, it is suggested that the laboratory family-resemblance task used by these previous investigators may be unrepresentative and may fail to mimic crucial aspects of the everyday category-learning context. It is also suggested that aspects of Ward et al.'s methodology may lead them to underestimate holistic (or nonselective) processing.
Across three experiments, we explore differences between relational categories—whose members share common relational patterns—and entity categories, whose members share common intrinsic properties. Specifically, we test the claim that relational concepts are more semantically mutable in context, and therefore less stable in memory, than entity concepts. We compared memory for entity nouns and relational nouns, tested either in the same context as at encoding or in a different context. We found that (1) participants show better recognition accuracy for entity nouns than for relational nouns and (2) recognition of relational nouns is more impaired by a change in context than is recognition of entity nouns. We replicated these findings even when controlling for factors highly correlated with relationality, such as abstractness-concreteness. This suggests that the contextual mutability of relational concepts is due to the core semantic property of conveying relational structure and not simply to accompanying characteristics such as abstractness. We note parallels with the distinction between nouns and verbs and suggest implications for lexical and conceptual structure. Finally, we relate these patterns to proposals that a deep distinction exists between words with an essentially referential function and those with a predicate function.
PQJE_1219752_supplemental_material.pdf
In the usage-based approach to children’s language learning, language is seen as emerging from children’s preverbal communicative and cognitive skills. Children construct more abstract linguistic representations only gradually, and show uneven development in all aspects of their language learning. I will present results that show the relationship between children’s emerging linguistic structures and patterns in the speech addressed to them, and demonstrate the effects played by the consistency of markers, the complexity of the construction in question, and relative type and token frequencies within and across constructions. I highlight the contribution made by research that employs naturalistic, experimental, and modelling methodologies, and that is applied to a range of languages and to variability in the errors that children make. Finally, I will outline the outstanding issues for this approach, and how we might address them.
The justification for a universal theory of language acquisition is the fact that the capacity of human beings for learning languages is not limited to one language, the mother tongue (L1). People can indeed learn more than one language. This can be achieved simultaneously, i.e. as the acquisition of several L1s, or nonsimultaneously, by learning additional languages subsequent to the L1. Furthermore, language can be learned without the benefit of foreign language instruction, as in naturalistic L2 acquisition, or within the classroom, as in tutored language acquisition. And, of course, human beings forget their languages and can re-learn them. Finally, one must not forget that even in certain pathological cases language acquisition is not impossible.
Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.
Much has been said about children’s strategies for mapping elements of meaning to words in toddlerhood. However, children continue to refine word meanings and patterns of word use into middle childhood and beyond, even for common words appearing in early vocabulary. We address where children past toddlerhood diverge from adults and where they more closely approximate them, and why. In two studies, we examined naming of locomotion (walking, running, hopping, etc.) by children aged four to nine and compared their patterns of word use to adult patterns. We evaluated whether the children are sensitive to the biomechanical discontinuity between pendulum-type and impact-and-recoil-type actions that constrains adult word use. We also evaluated whether they appreciate this constraint by age four or only develop appreciation later. Children from four onward were sensitive to the biomechanical distinction in their word use. Perceived domain structure plays a role in explaining later lexical development.
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