Word learning Flashcards
MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MBCDI)
List of words that children are likely to know. Parents report the words that their children know on this list.
Lexical entries of words include information about…
Phonological form, syntactic category and meaning
Vocabulary spurt
Period of time when a child acquires words very quickly
Kids usually learn their first word in production at ___ years old
1
First vocabulary spurt
1;6 (after around 50 words learned)
Children’s early lexicon mostly contains …
Nouns (mostly common nouns)
Age at which children start to acquire verbs and adjectives faster
1;6
Once the child has __ words, function words increase in number and frequency
400
Do nouns predominate in early speech because they occupy salient positions in sentences?
No
Nouns are ____, meaning they are linked to a concept like an object or a person; this makes them easier to acquire, especially concrete nouns
Referential
Verbs are harder to acquire because they have…
Argument structure : they permit or require certain types of arguments (e.g., subject, direct object) to complete their meaning
Overextension
A word is used by the child to cover more meanings than it has in the target language
- Based on properties like :
shape, size, sound, texture and more rarely functional characteristics
Underextension
A word refers to less meanings than in the target language.
Prediction if overextension is due to the child representing the word as a subset of semantic features of the adult word
Overextension will apply to both production and comprehension
Prediction if overextension is only due to inability to recall the right word
Production errors only
For all children there is less overextension in ______comprehension/production
Comprehension
Overextension and underextension are based on the ______ of objects
Features
Learning by ostension
Parent shows the child a thing and labels it with a word
Factors that explain why child’s semantic representations are not target-like
- length of time since the word’s acquisition (recently acquired = less semantic features info ) ;
o frequency and breadth of use of the word in the child’s experience.
Overextension likely often arises from …
Word retrieval difficulties due to cognitive demands issues.
Fast mapping
Children need very few exposures to a new word to acquire some aspects of its meaning
The Gavagai problem
When the child is presented with a word, there is infinite logical hypotheses the child can make about the word’s meaning
How word learning impacts phonology
When we cannot predict when a rule applies, it is possible that the variation is due to old words that resist adapting to the new grammar. (E.g. some words are produced in a target-like way, but in other earlier acquired words, [ae] became [ɛ] because [ae] was too difficult to pronounce when the word was acquired)
True or false : children make mistakes like the ones predicted by the Galvagai problem
False
