Lecture 3, Word Learning

Question 1

Infant studies tend to research what about infants?

Answer 1

1. What they already know about their language already, so comprehension, and recording how they talk in natural settings.
2. Teaching them new words, so what they can learn and how they can learn it.

Question 2

We know that comprehension precedes production, but how and when do infants comprehend words?

Answer 2

• 2 y/os comprehend 2-3x as many words as they produce [Goldin-Meadow et al., 1976]
• Infants appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 months [Bergelson & Swingley, 2012]
• Infants start to comprehend verbs later, around 10 months [Bergelson & Swingley, 2013]
• Between 18 and 24 months, infants get much faster on the looking-while-listening task [Fernald et al., 1998]
• By 18 months, they don’t even need the full word [Fernald, Swingley & Pinto, 2001]

Question 3

How and when do infants produce words?

Answer 3

Infants produce their first words around 12 months, and by 24-30 months, they can produce around 500 words.
Their first words can be a range of categories, including nouns, verbs, social routines [hello, please etc.,] or adjectives. They can also lack things such as articles [a, the].
Infants tend to have early noun bias, meaning there is a predominance of nouns in early vocabularies (40% of English-speaking children’s first 50 words, Nelson 1973).
Words are socially mediated according to Tomasello, 2003. Learning occurs in situations where it is easiest to read adult’s intentions, irrespective of their word class, it happens often with nouns.

Question 4

What is the Natural Partitions Hypothesis?

Answer 4

Proposed by Gentner, 1982, the theory suggests that early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings. Actions, states etc., tend to apply to entities labelled by nouns, and are less clearly defined in space and time.

Question 5

In production, errors often occur, what are they?

Answer 5

Underextension - words used only in specific context or specific examples. [Supported by Bates et al., 1979; Barrett, 1982; Fernandez & Cairns, 2011]
Overextension - words used beyond its true meaning. [Supported by Rescoria, 1980]

Question 6

What is the meaning of Object-Constraint? [Gentner, 1982]

Answer 6

Words refer to objects; explains early noun bias

Question 7

What is Whole-Object Constraint? [Markman, 1991]

Answer 7

Words refer to whole objects rather than their parts.

Question 8

What is the Principle of Contrast? [Clark, 1995]

Answer 8

No two words have exactly the same meaning - explains how the child overcomes overextension.

Question 9

What is Mutual Exclusivity? [Markman, 1998]

Answer 9

No object has more than one name; this helps override the ‘whole-object constraint’ and learn the names for parts of objects.

Question 10

What are the problems with constraint theories?

Answer 10

• Do constraints explain word-learning or just describe it?
• Are constraints innate or learned via experience?
• Are constraints specific to language?

Question 11

What is the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis [proposed by Gelitman, 1990]?

Answer 11

Based on the idea that there are universal, innate links between syntactic categories and semantic categories - can therefore use observations about syntactic categories of novel words to make inferences about their meanings.

Question 12

What did Waxman and Booth conclude about 14 months extended novel nouns and adjectives?

Answer 12

With nouns, children extend the noun to the category, but not the property.

Question 13

What type of structural cue is learned early?

Answer 13

Structural cues to nouns, whereas structural cues to words appear later.

Question 14

What do two-year olds use to narrow down verb meanings? [Naigles, 1990]

Answer 14

Structural cues

Question 15

What are issues with structural cues to word meaning?

Answer 15

• Children are sensitive to some aspects of sentence structure, but not clear exactly what and when
• Some knowledge of words and categories are needed to understand their structure
• Do experimental studies reveal something about the long-term learning of word meaning, or immediate problem-solving task?
• Structural information can’t solve all the problems

Question 16

What is the social-pragmatic approach?

Answer 16

Proposed by Tomasello, it is the theory that children learn words and word meaning from pragmatic cues in the environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning.

Question 17

According to the social-pragmatic approach, in which two main ways is word learning constrained?

Answer 17

1. The social world is structured Routines, games, patterned social interactions
2. Social cognitive skills, the infant has: joint attention, intention reading

Question 18

What are scaffolding routines?

Answer 18

Children learn language in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines. - YOung children learn almost all of their early language in cultural routines

Question 19

When do children experience ‘social revolution’?

Answer 19

At approximately 9 months

Question 20

What happens during joint attention?

Answer 20

Adults use language and children attempt to interpret communicative intent.

Question 21

How does word learning occur?

Answer 21

When children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utternance

Question 22

What does shared common ground reduce?

Answer 22

The possible referents

Question 23

What is intention reading?

Answer 23

Children use speaker’s intentions to infer meaning. They already know the name of familiar objects, and they know the adult knows this.
2 year olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult looking for rather than objects they have rejected.

Question 24

What is the acquisition of verbs?

Answer 24

Children able to interpret adult’s anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action.

Question 25

When learning new verbs, what can children differentiate between?

Answer 25

Intended and accidental actions when learning new verbs.