21 - Word Meaning 1 Flashcards
How do infants become more perceptive and making distinctions in their own language?
Distributional information (statistical learning)
Why can’t adults find distinctions in other languages?
Because they have developed a categorical perception of phonemes through statistical learning
Does word comprehension or word production come first in infants aged 1-2 years?
Comprehension
Do infants aged 1-2 years have a sharper increase with their comprehension or word production?
Word production occurs rapidly towards the end of first year, comprehension is more steady
How many words do adults know on average?
More than 60,000
How many words do children learn on average each day at 12-16 months?
How many at 8-10 years?
12-16 months = .3 words per day
8-10 years =- 12.1 words per day
Adults tend to stop learning words at a certain age, what are the two arguments put forth for why?
The critical period argument, we are no longer able
The environment: we know most words in our immediate environment
What was the Werker et al. (1998) infant word learning experiment (what was the method)?
Infant are able to associate words with objects in the lab
8, 12, and 14-months olds trained with novel word-object pairings
Repeated presentations
Tested with habituation
- Correct word/object pairings given until habituation
- Incorrect word/ object pairings then presented
What were the results of the Werker et al. (1998) infant word learning experiment?
All the infants looked at the incorrect word/object pairings
When there were 2 word/object pairings only 14-month olds could do this for both
Younger groups could only do this for one or the other
Difficulty to map onto a label with what is referring to in the world when there are multiple objects present in the field of view is called…
Referential Uncertainty
It is hard to determine whether infants understand what we think they understand because of
Referential Uncertainty
Infants will often hear unique words in a sentence rather than in isolation, why is this a challenge for learning?
Word segmentation and referential uncertainty makes it hard for infants to understand what the word is referring to
How do we learn word meanings?
Through a combination of statistical learning and a bias towards communication
What are the 5 suggested mechanisms for how we learn word meanings in the real world?
Fast mapping
Cross-situational word learning
Zipfian distributions
Mutual Exclusivity
Communicative intent
What is fast mapping?
The fact that biologically prone to quickly refer words to objects and remember them well
Describe the Markson and Bloom (1997) experimental method which they used to show ‘fast mapping’?
Experiment with 2 phases
Training phase:
Playing measuring games with 10 objects
3 conditions for 3 objects. Casually mention ONCE ONLY:
“This is a Koba. Let’s put the Koba here.”
“This is from my uncle. Let’s put it here.”
“Let’s put this sticker here [on object].”
Test phase:
ONE MONTH LATER:
10 items, pick out the referenced item
What were the results of the Markson and Bloom (1997) fast mapping experiment?
Children could learn the item based on its name, but they were even stronger at identifying the social aspect item (that it was given by an uncle). This is not language-specific but social connections is another valuable learning tool.
Sticker was not helpful in remembering, only language and social connection
What are ‘Zipfian distributions’?
Words are not distributed evenly but are skewed.
Some words are very common whereas other words are more rare.
Low-frequency words are hard to learn because they are not heard often
High-frequency words might help
How has it been suggested that we use zipfian distributions to learn words?
How was it shown?
We use ‘high-frequency words’ to learn ‘low-frequency words’
Adults learned new words at a high or low frequency
They had to match 4 objects to 4 certain words
They were better at matching objects when high-frequency words were included rather than just low-frequency words
I.e. we know two words so we only need to figure out the last two word-object pairings
Are object-word relationships mutually exclusive?
No, there are multiple different words we can use to portray an object
How did Landau, Smith and Jones (1992) test (methodology) how we generalise word meanings?
Tested on both adults and children
The stimuli used were physical objects
They presented the ‘dax’ then other objects when the texture, size, or the shape was different (all other properties were the same).
Tested on whether they believed it ‘is a dax’
What are the three degrees of which we generalise word meanings?
Superordinate
Basic
Subordinate
What does this experiment on generalising word meanings show us?
How we generalise words is sensitive to the context we have learnt them.
- That if we use one-word, we are likely to generalise to the ‘basic level’ (i.e. might select a different dog if shown a dalmation)*
- 3 sub examples we wont generalise to basic level*
- 3 basic example we are not likely to generalise to the superordinate level*
- If we are given 3 items from the super level they will generalise to the other category hierarchies.*
Children are more likely to generalise to the superordinate level than adults - true or false
False, both aren’t overly likely to generalise to the superordinate level, kids less so
