Utterances that are close in time are more likely to share the same referent. A word learner who ... more Utterances that are close in time are more likely to share the same referent. A word learner who is using information about the speaker's intended referents should be able to take advantage of this continuity and learn words more efficiently by aggregating information across multiple utterances. In the current study we use corpus data to explore the continuity of reference in caregivers' speech to infants. We measure the degree of referential continuity in two corpora and then use regression modeling to test whether reference continuity is informative about speakers' referential intentions. We conclude by developing a simple discourse-continuity prior within a Bayesian model of word learning. Our results suggest that discourse continuity may be a valuable information source in early word learning.
Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infa... more Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infants and adults. In Experiment 1,18 mothers told a story to a 14-month-old infant and to an adult, using a picture book in which 6 target items were the focus of attention. Prosodic emphasis was measured both acoustically and subjectively In speech to infants, mothers consistently positioned focused words on exaggerated pitch peaks in utterance-final position, whereas in speech to adults prosodic emphasis was more variable. In Experiment 2,12 women taught another adult an assembly procedure involving familiar and novel terminology. In both studies, stressed words in adultdirected speech rarely coincided with pitch peaks. However, in infant-directed speech, mothers regularly used pitch prominence to convey primary stress. The use of exaggerated pitch peaks at the ends of utterances to mark focused words may facilitate speech processing for the infant.
Research on the early development of fundamental cognitive and language capacities has focused al... more Research on the early development of fundamental cognitive and language capacities has focused almost exclusively on infants from middle-class families, excluding children living in poverty who may experience less cognitive stimulation in the first years of life. Ignoring such differences limits our ability to discover the potentially powerful contributions of environmental support to the ontogeny of cognitive and language abilities.
This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicat... more This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicative intent of the speaker in speech addressed to preverbal infants and in speech addressed to adults. Natural samples of infant- and adult-directed speech were recorded from 5 mothers of 12-month-old infants, in 5 standardized interactional contexts: Attention-bid, Approval, Prohibition, Comfort, and Game/Telephone. 25 infant-directed and 25 adult-directed vocalizations were electronically filtered to eliminate linguistic content. The content-filtered speech stimuli were presented to 80 adult subjects: 40 experienced parents and 40 students inexperienced with infants. The subjects' task was to identify the communicative intent of the speaker using only prosodic information, given a 5-alternative forced choice. Listeners were able to use intonation to identify the speaker's intent with significantly higher accuracy in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that the prosodic patterns of speech to infants are more informative than those of adult-adult speech, and may provide the infant with reliable cues to the communicative intent of the speaker. The interpretation of these results proposed here is that the relation of prosodic form to communicative function is made uniquely salient in the melodies of mothers' speech, and that these characteristic prosodic patterns are potentially meaningful to the preverbal infant.
Adults reason differently about the actions of people than they do about the movements of inanima... more Adults reason differently about the actions of people than they do about the movements of inanimate objects. Objects move according to principles of physics while humans act according to mental states, such as their desires, beliefs, intentions and emotions. The knowledge that human behavior can be understood in terms of an actor's probable psychological states constitutes an individual's folk psychology or theory of mind. In trying to understand how a theory of mind develops, it is important to investigate whether infants demonstrate any implicit understanding of mental states or any abilities that might serve as a prerequisite to a theory of mind. In an infant-controlled visual habituation paradigm, we investigated one-year-old infants' abilities to use an actress' emotional display to predict which of two objects she was more likely to act on.
2008 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, 2008
Two studies explore how early vocabulary learning is influenced both by maternal speech to the ch... more Two studies explore how early vocabulary learning is influenced both by maternal speech to the child and by the child's developing skill in real-time comprehension. Study 1 shows that amount and quality of mothers' speech predict language growth in Spanish-learning children, providing the first evidence that language input shapes speech processing efficiency as well as lexical development. Study 2 demonstrates that early efficiency in speech processing is beneficial for vocabulary growth, showing how fluency in online comprehension facilitates learning.
Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study inves... more Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.
Two-month-old infants discriminated complex sinusoidal patterns that varied in the duration of th... more Two-month-old infants discriminated complex sinusoidal patterns that varied in the duration of their initial frequency transitions. Discrimination of these nonspeech sinusoidal patterns was a function of both the duration of the transitions and the total duration of the stimulus pattern. This contextual effect was observed even though the information specifying stimulus duration occurred after the transitional information. These findings parallel those observed with infants for perception of synthetic speech stimuli. Specialized speech processing capacities are thus not required to account for infants' sensitivity to contextual effects in acoustic signals, whether speech or nonspeech.
All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding article... more All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of ''the,'' respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender ( la pelota, ''ball [ feminine]''; la galleta, ''cookie [ feminine]'') or different grammatical gender ( la pelota; el zapato, ''shoe [masculine]''), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, ''Find the ball''). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.
The intelligibility of a word in continuous speech depends on the clarity of the word and on ling... more The intelligibility of a word in continuous speech depends on the clarity of the word and on linguistic and nonlinguistic contextual information available to the listener. Despite limited knowledge of language and the world, infants in the first 2 years are already beginning to make use of contextual information in processing speech. Adults interacting with infants tend to modify their speech in ways that serve to maximize predictability for the immature listener by highlighting focussed words and using frequent repetition and formulaic utterances. Infant-directed speech is viewed as a form of 'hyperspeech' which facilities comprehension, not by modifying phonetic properties of individual words but rather by providing contextual support on perceptual levels accessible to infants even in the earliest stages of language learning.
Two experiments using online speech processing measures with 18-to 36-month-olds extended researc... more Two experiments using online speech processing measures with 18-to 36-month-olds extended research by showing that young children's comprehension is disrupted when the grammatical determiner in a noun phrase is replaced with a nonce determiner (the car vs. po car). In Expt. 1, 18-month-olds were slower and less accurate to identify familiar nouns on nonce-article than grammatical-article trials, although older children who produced determiners in their own speech showed no disruption. However, when tested on novel words in Expt. 2, even linguistically advanced 34-month-olds had greater difficulty identifying familiar as well as newly learned object names preceded by a nonce article. Children's success in "listening through" an uninformative functor-like nonce syllable before a familiar noun was related to their level of grammatical competence, but their attention to the nonce article also varied with lexical familiarity and the overall redundancy of the processing context.
Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and nonnative Spanish-... more Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and nonnative Spanish-speaking adults use gender-marked articles to identify referents of target nouns more rapidly, as shown previously with 3-year-old children learning Spanish as L1 . In Experiment 1, participants viewed familiar objects with names of either the same or different grammatical gender while listening to Spanish sentences referring to one object. L1 adults, like L1 children, oriented to the target more rapidly on different-gender trials, when the article was informative about noun identity; however, L2 adults did not. Experiments 2 and 3 controlled for frequency of exposure to article-noun pairs by using novel nouns. L2 adults could not exploit gender information when different article-noun pairs were used in teaching and testing. Experience-related factors may influence how L1 adults and children and L2 adults-who learned Spanish at different ages and in different settings-use grammatical gender in real-time processing.
Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate... more Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate expectancies for upcoming language, little work has explored how this knowledge is initially acquired and used. We explore this question in 3-to 10-year-old children and adults by measuring the degree to which sentences depicting recently learned connections between agents, actions and objects lead to anticipatory eye-movements to the objects. Combinatory information in sentences about agent and action elicited anticipatory eyemovements to the Target object in adults and older children. Our findings suggest that adults and school-aged children can quickly activate information about recently exposed novel event relationships in real-time language processing. However, there were important developmental differences in the use of this knowledge. Adults and school-aged children used the sentential agent and action to predict the sentence final theme, while preschool children's fixations reflected a simple association to the currently spoken item. We consider several reasons for this developmental difference and possible extensions of this paradigm.
Utterances that are close in time are more likely to share the same referent. A word learner who ... more Utterances that are close in time are more likely to share the same referent. A word learner who is using information about the speaker's intended referents should be able to take advantage of this continuity and learn words more efficiently by aggregating information across multiple utterances. In the current study we use corpus data to explore the continuity of reference in caregivers' speech to infants. We measure the degree of referential continuity in two corpora and then use regression modeling to test whether reference continuity is informative about speakers' referential intentions. We conclude by developing a simple discourse-continuity prior within a Bayesian model of word learning. Our results suggest that discourse continuity may be a valuable information source in early word learning.
Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infa... more Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infants and adults. In Experiment 1,18 mothers told a story to a 14-month-old infant and to an adult, using a picture book in which 6 target items were the focus of attention. Prosodic emphasis was measured both acoustically and subjectively In speech to infants, mothers consistently positioned focused words on exaggerated pitch peaks in utterance-final position, whereas in speech to adults prosodic emphasis was more variable. In Experiment 2,12 women taught another adult an assembly procedure involving familiar and novel terminology. In both studies, stressed words in adultdirected speech rarely coincided with pitch peaks. However, in infant-directed speech, mothers regularly used pitch prominence to convey primary stress. The use of exaggerated pitch peaks at the ends of utterances to mark focused words may facilitate speech processing for the infant.
Research on the early development of fundamental cognitive and language capacities has focused al... more Research on the early development of fundamental cognitive and language capacities has focused almost exclusively on infants from middle-class families, excluding children living in poverty who may experience less cognitive stimulation in the first years of life. Ignoring such differences limits our ability to discover the potentially powerful contributions of environmental support to the ontogeny of cognitive and language abilities.
This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicat... more This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicative intent of the speaker in speech addressed to preverbal infants and in speech addressed to adults. Natural samples of infant- and adult-directed speech were recorded from 5 mothers of 12-month-old infants, in 5 standardized interactional contexts: Attention-bid, Approval, Prohibition, Comfort, and Game/Telephone. 25 infant-directed and 25 adult-directed vocalizations were electronically filtered to eliminate linguistic content. The content-filtered speech stimuli were presented to 80 adult subjects: 40 experienced parents and 40 students inexperienced with infants. The subjects' task was to identify the communicative intent of the speaker using only prosodic information, given a 5-alternative forced choice. Listeners were able to use intonation to identify the speaker's intent with significantly higher accuracy in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that the prosodic patterns of speech to infants are more informative than those of adult-adult speech, and may provide the infant with reliable cues to the communicative intent of the speaker. The interpretation of these results proposed here is that the relation of prosodic form to communicative function is made uniquely salient in the melodies of mothers' speech, and that these characteristic prosodic patterns are potentially meaningful to the preverbal infant.
Adults reason differently about the actions of people than they do about the movements of inanima... more Adults reason differently about the actions of people than they do about the movements of inanimate objects. Objects move according to principles of physics while humans act according to mental states, such as their desires, beliefs, intentions and emotions. The knowledge that human behavior can be understood in terms of an actor's probable psychological states constitutes an individual's folk psychology or theory of mind. In trying to understand how a theory of mind develops, it is important to investigate whether infants demonstrate any implicit understanding of mental states or any abilities that might serve as a prerequisite to a theory of mind. In an infant-controlled visual habituation paradigm, we investigated one-year-old infants' abilities to use an actress' emotional display to predict which of two objects she was more likely to act on.
2008 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, 2008
Two studies explore how early vocabulary learning is influenced both by maternal speech to the ch... more Two studies explore how early vocabulary learning is influenced both by maternal speech to the child and by the child's developing skill in real-time comprehension. Study 1 shows that amount and quality of mothers' speech predict language growth in Spanish-learning children, providing the first evidence that language input shapes speech processing efficiency as well as lexical development. Study 2 demonstrates that early efficiency in speech processing is beneficial for vocabulary growth, showing how fluency in online comprehension facilitates learning.
Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study inves... more Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.
Two-month-old infants discriminated complex sinusoidal patterns that varied in the duration of th... more Two-month-old infants discriminated complex sinusoidal patterns that varied in the duration of their initial frequency transitions. Discrimination of these nonspeech sinusoidal patterns was a function of both the duration of the transitions and the total duration of the stimulus pattern. This contextual effect was observed even though the information specifying stimulus duration occurred after the transitional information. These findings parallel those observed with infants for perception of synthetic speech stimuli. Specialized speech processing capacities are thus not required to account for infants' sensitivity to contextual effects in acoustic signals, whether speech or nonspeech.
All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding article... more All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of ''the,'' respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender ( la pelota, ''ball [ feminine]''; la galleta, ''cookie [ feminine]'') or different grammatical gender ( la pelota; el zapato, ''shoe [masculine]''), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, ''Find the ball''). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.
The intelligibility of a word in continuous speech depends on the clarity of the word and on ling... more The intelligibility of a word in continuous speech depends on the clarity of the word and on linguistic and nonlinguistic contextual information available to the listener. Despite limited knowledge of language and the world, infants in the first 2 years are already beginning to make use of contextual information in processing speech. Adults interacting with infants tend to modify their speech in ways that serve to maximize predictability for the immature listener by highlighting focussed words and using frequent repetition and formulaic utterances. Infant-directed speech is viewed as a form of 'hyperspeech' which facilities comprehension, not by modifying phonetic properties of individual words but rather by providing contextual support on perceptual levels accessible to infants even in the earliest stages of language learning.
Two experiments using online speech processing measures with 18-to 36-month-olds extended researc... more Two experiments using online speech processing measures with 18-to 36-month-olds extended research by showing that young children's comprehension is disrupted when the grammatical determiner in a noun phrase is replaced with a nonce determiner (the car vs. po car). In Expt. 1, 18-month-olds were slower and less accurate to identify familiar nouns on nonce-article than grammatical-article trials, although older children who produced determiners in their own speech showed no disruption. However, when tested on novel words in Expt. 2, even linguistically advanced 34-month-olds had greater difficulty identifying familiar as well as newly learned object names preceded by a nonce article. Children's success in "listening through" an uninformative functor-like nonce syllable before a familiar noun was related to their level of grammatical competence, but their attention to the nonce article also varied with lexical familiarity and the overall redundancy of the processing context.
Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and nonnative Spanish-... more Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and nonnative Spanish-speaking adults use gender-marked articles to identify referents of target nouns more rapidly, as shown previously with 3-year-old children learning Spanish as L1 . In Experiment 1, participants viewed familiar objects with names of either the same or different grammatical gender while listening to Spanish sentences referring to one object. L1 adults, like L1 children, oriented to the target more rapidly on different-gender trials, when the article was informative about noun identity; however, L2 adults did not. Experiments 2 and 3 controlled for frequency of exposure to article-noun pairs by using novel nouns. L2 adults could not exploit gender information when different article-noun pairs were used in teaching and testing. Experience-related factors may influence how L1 adults and children and L2 adults-who learned Spanish at different ages and in different settings-use grammatical gender in real-time processing.
Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate... more Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate expectancies for upcoming language, little work has explored how this knowledge is initially acquired and used. We explore this question in 3-to 10-year-old children and adults by measuring the degree to which sentences depicting recently learned connections between agents, actions and objects lead to anticipatory eye-movements to the objects. Combinatory information in sentences about agent and action elicited anticipatory eyemovements to the Target object in adults and older children. Our findings suggest that adults and school-aged children can quickly activate information about recently exposed novel event relationships in real-time language processing. However, there were important developmental differences in the use of this knowledge. Adults and school-aged children used the sentential agent and action to predict the sentence final theme, while preschool children's fixations reflected a simple association to the currently spoken item. We consider several reasons for this developmental difference and possible extensions of this paradigm.
This study investigated whether European American and Japanese mothers’ speech to preschoolers co... more This study investigated whether European American and Japanese mothers’ speech to preschoolers contained exchange- and alignment-oriented structures that reflect and possibly support culture-specific models of self-other relatedness. In each country, 12 mothers were observed in free play with their 3-year-olds. Maternal speech was coded for linguistic framing and frame-function mapping, using a cross-linguistically informed coding scheme rooted in aspects of English and Japanese grammar. American and Japanese mothers were remarkably similar in the number of queries, declaratives, and imperatives they produced. At the same time, Americans tended to verbally frame the mother-child relationship in terms of idea exchange between allies with individual perspectives, whereas Japanese tended to frame it in terms of mutually shared points of view. These significant findings are consistent with the idea of independent and interdependent self-schemas in the U.S. and Japan, and suggest that language socialization might contribute to the development of American- and Japanese-style relatedness models.
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