3. WORD LEARNING

Question 1

types of word learning studies

Answer 1

• looking while listening/pointing (comprehension)
• recording how children talk in naturalistic settings, asking them to name things (production)

teaching children new words in lab
- what can they learn?
- how do they learn?

Question 2

“point and name” learning

Answer 2

• usually only nouns
• point and name is not common and not universal

Question 3

the mapping problem

Answer 3

• example of foreign word “gavagai”
• when something is labelled it could apply to multiple aspects
• under extension
• over extension

Quine, 1960

Question 4

comprehension in infants

Answer 4

• appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 months
• infants start to comprehend verbs later - 10 months
• 2 year olds comprehend 2-3x as many words as they produce

comprehension precedes production

Question 5

looking while listening task

Answer 5

• 2 options, “look at hand” “… apple”
• between 18 and 24 months they get much faster (Fernald)
• by 18 months they don’t even need the full word
  (Fernald, Swingley, & Pinto, 2001)

Question 6

early noun bias

Answer 6

cross-linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocabularies

e.g., 40% of English speaking childrens first 50 words - Nelson

more nouns even in “verb friendlier” languages

Question 7

natural partitions hypothesis

Answer 7

early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings

actions, states etc. tend to apply to entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space & time

Gentner, 1982

Question 8

socially mediated word learning

Answer 8

• not all early words are nouns (hello)
• not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast)
• learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult’s intentions, irrespective of word class
• happend often with nouns

Tomasello, 2003

Question 9

Variety of early word production

Answer 9

Variety of situations
- names for people and objects
- names for actions
- names for properties

Tomasello, 1992

Question 10

under-extension

Answer 10

word used only in specific context or specific exemplar

words used in specific contexts where adults would use in a wide range of contexts

• ‘bye’ only when putting the telephone receiver down
• ‘there’ only when putting an object in a location
• refer to the word flower to only mean a rose and not other flowers

Question 11

Overextension

Answer 11

word used beyond its true meaning

overextension errors are frequent
- e.g., calling a ball an apple
- make erorrs until ~ 2.5 years
- category error
- vocabulary limitations

(Rescorla, 1980)

Question 12

Object constraint - ‘innate’ constraint

Answer 12

• words refer to objects
• explains early noun bias

Gentner, 1982

Question 13

whole-object - ‘innate’ constraint

Answer 13

• words refer to whole object rather than their parts
• “gavagai” = whole animal

Markman, 1991

Question 14

principle of contrast - ‘innate’ constraint

Answer 14

• no words have exactly the same meaning
• explains how the child overcomes overextension

Clark, 1995

Question 15

Mutual exclusivity - ‘innate constraint’

Answer 15

• no object has more than one name
• helps children override the ‘whole object constraint’ and learn the names for parts of objects

Markman, 1988

Question 16

Are constraints specific to language?

Answer 16

example
- my uncle gave me this (show object)
- give me the one my dog likes to play with (from array)
- 3 year olds select new object, social inferencing on intention unrelated to meaning of words

Diesendruck & Markson, 2001

Question 17

syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis

Answer 17

• based on the idea that there are innate links between syntactic and semantic categories
• learners can make inferences about semantics from their observations on synactic category

Gleitman, 1990

Question 18

structural cues - kneading task

Answer 18

3-5 year olds shown picture of someone kneading a substance in a bowl
- do you know what is means to sib? (other questions about ‘sib’)

task: pick sibling, a sib, or sib from a selection of pictures depicting several actions, substances, and containers
- sibbing = picture of kneading
- a sib = picture of bowl
- sib = picture of substance

Brown, 1957

Question 19

structural cues - fep task

Answer 19

4 year olds pick different object of same kind when asked to find the fep one, but a different abject when asked to find the fep

Gelman & Markman, 1985

Question 20

structural cues study: how infants extend novel nouns and adjectives

Answer 20

14 month olds

with nouns children extended the noun to the category but not the property
- noun/adj - new term (syntactic), , property - colour, category - animal

with adjectives children do not extent to the category or property

Waxman and Booth, 2001

Question 21

the social-pragmatic approach

Answer 21

• children learn words and word meaning from pragmatic cues in the environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning
• word learning is constrained in 2 main ways:

1. the social world is structured: routines, games, patterned social interaction
2. social cognitive skills the infant has: joint attention, intention reading

Tomasello, 2003

Question 22

Social pragmatic approach: routines

Answer 22

Children learn language in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines
- young children learn almost all their early language in cultural routines
- cross culturally children are engaged in a wide range of social routines and learn most of their early words in familiar contexts

Question 23

the social-pragmatic approach: social cognitive skills

Answer 23

• during joint revolution adults use language and children attempt to interpret the communicative intent
• world learning occurs when children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utterance
• the shared common groupd reduces the possible referents

Question 24

the social pragmatic approach: intentional reading

Answer 24

• children use speaker’s intentions to infer meaning
• child already knows name of familiar object on table & knows the adult knows. So can assume that the adult intends the novel object when the adult asks …. (Baldwin)
• 2 year olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult looking for rather than objects they have rejected

Question 25

social pragmatic approach: acquisition of verbs

Answer 25

children able to interpret adult’s anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action
(Tomasello & Kruger, 1992)

children can differentiate between intended and accidental actions when learning new verbs
(Tomasello & Barton, 1994)