Language Learning and Development

Volume 18, Issue 1-4, 2022

目录

Issue 1

■Early Acquisition of Plural Morphology in a Classifier Language: Data from Korean 2-4 Year Olds, by Dorothy Ahn & Jesse Snedeker, Pages 1-15.

■ Emergent Morphology in Child Homesign: Evidence from Number Language, by Natasha Abner, Savithry Namboodiripad, Elizabet Spaepen & Susan Goldin-Meadow, Pages 16–40.

■ Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?, by Irmtraud Kaiser, Pages 41–61.

■Improvement of Communicative-pragmatic Ability in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Adapted Version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatme, by Ilaria Gabbatore, Claudio Longobardi & Francesca M. Bosco, Pages 62–80.

■ Consistency and Inconsistency in Caregiver Reporting of Vocabulary, by Sudha Arunachalam, Valeryia Avtushka, Rhiannon J. Luyster & Whitney Guthrie, Pages 81–96.

■How Adults and Children Interpret Disjunction under Negation in Dutch, French, Hungarian and Italian: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison, by Elena Pagliarini, Oana Lungu, Angeliek van Hout, Lilla Pintér, Balázs Surányi, Stephen Crain & Maria Teresa Guasti, Pages 97–122.

Issue 2

■ Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation, by

Naomi Shin & Karen Miller, Pages 125–150.

■ Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency, by Anisia Popescu & Aude Noiray, Pages 151-170.

■After the Null Subject Parameter: Acquisition of the Null-Overt Contrast in Spanish, by Hannah Forsythe, Daniel Greeson & Cristina Schmitt, Pages 171–200.

■ The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners, by Sybren Spit, Sible Andringa, Judith Rispens & Enoch O. Abo, Pages 201–228.

■ Change Is Hard: Individual Differences in Children’s Lexical Processing and Executive Functions after a Shift in Dimensions, by Ron Pomper, Margarita Kaushanskaya & Jenny Saffran, Pages 229–247.

Issue 3

■Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners, by Alison C. Austin, Kathryn D. Schuler, Sarah Furlong & Elissa L. Newport, Pages 249–227.

■Infants’ Sensitivity to Lexical Tone and Word Stress in Their First Year: A Thai and English Cross-Language Study, by Marina Kalashnikova, Chutamanee Onsuwan & Denis Burnham, Pages 278–293.

■Culture at Play: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Mother-Child Communication during Toy Play, by Sirada Rochanavibhata & Viorica Marian, Pages 294–309.

■Linguistic Variation in the Acquisition of Morphosyntax: Variable Object Marking in the Speech of Mexican Children and Their Caregivers, by M. Cole Callen & Karen Miller, Pages 310–323.

■ Objects Shape Activation during Spoken Word Recognition in Preschoolers with Typical and Atypical Language Development: An Eye-tracking Study, by Andrea Helo, Ernesto Guerra, Carmen Julia Coloma, María Antonia Reyes & Pia Rämä, Pages 324–351.

■Difference or Delay? Syntax, Semantics, and Verb Vocabulary Development in Typically Developing and Late-talking Toddlers, by Sabrina Horvath, Justin B. Kueser, Jaelyn Kelly & Arielle Borovsky, Pages 352–376.

Issue 4

■The Impact of Auditory Perceptual Training on the Perception and Production of English Vowels by Cypriot Greek Children and Adults, by Georgios P. Georgiou，Pages 379–392.

■ Cross-generational Phonetic Alignment between Mothers and Their Children, by Thomas St. Pierre, Angela Cooper & Elizabeth K. Johnson, Pages 393–414.

■ Poverty of the Stimulus Without Tears, by Lisa Pearl, Pages 415–454.

■The Type of Feedback Provided Can Affect Morphological Rule Learning of Young Children, by Sara Ferman, Sapir Amira Shmuel & Yael Zaltz, Pages 455–474.

■Repetition, but Not Acoustic Differentiation, Facilitates Pseudohomophone Learning by Children, by Erin Conwell, Felix Pichardo, Gregor Horvath & Amanda Lopez, Pages 475–484.

■Home Literacy Environment and English as A Second Language Acquisition: A Meta-analysis, by Yang Dong & Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow, Pages 485–499.

摘要

Early Acquisition of Plural Morphology in a Classifier Language: Data from Korean 2-4 Year Olds

Dorothy Ahn , Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA

Jesse Snedeker, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA

AbstractKorean is a classifier language in which bare nouns are not obligatorily number-marked. Children learning other classifier languages like Japanese and Mandarin are late in learning the plural morpheme. In this paper, we present two datasets that suggest that Korean plural marker -tul is acquired much earlier, in contrast to what has been previously claimed. In a comprehension study, we find that Korean children begin acquiring this morpheme by age 3, showing adult-like performance by age 4. We suggest that the higher frequency of plural marking on both types and tokens of nouns and the consistent marking of plural in the domain of definite nouns may facilitate Korean plural acquisition.

Emergent Morphology in Child Homesign: Evidence from Number Language

Natasha Abner, Savithry Namboodiripad, Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI USA Savithry, Namboodiripad, Spaepen

Elizabet Spaepen, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, IL, USA

AbstractHuman languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative forms with meanings. One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use and re-use of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent paradigmatic morphology akin to number inflection in a communication system developed without input from a conventional language, homesign. We study the communication systems of four deaf child homesigners (mean age 8;02). Although these idiosyncratic systems vary from one another, we nevertheless find that all four children use handshape and movement devices productively to express cardinal and non-cardinal number information, and that their number expressions are consistent in both form and meaning. Our study shows, for the first time, that all four homesigners not only incorporate number devices into representational devices used as predicates , but also into gestures functioning as nominals, including deictic gestures. In other words, the homesigners express number by systematically combining and re-combining additive markers for number (qua inflectional morphemes) with representational and deictic gestures (qua bases). The creation of new, complex forms with predictable meanings across gesture types and linguistic functions constitutes evidence for an inflectional morphological paradigm in homesign and expands our understanding of the structural patterns of language that are, and are not, dependent on linguistic input.

Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?

Irmtraud Kaiser, Department of German Linguistics and Literatures, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

AbstractThe present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children’s dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults’ linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard continuum but individual acquisition processes have hardly been studied yet. We collected language data from 49 children in five different communicative interactions each and analyzed the repertoire each child exhibits. The majority of children could be shown to have a bi-varietal repertoire at their disposal, but there were substantial numbers of children who exhibited either standard-only or dialect-only repertoires. We then examined the relationships between a child’s repertoire and potentially relevant input and sociodemographic variables. While language variety use in the home and maternal education did not prove significant predictors of children’s repertoires, gender, age, location, bilingualism and frequency of being read to did.

Improvement of Communicative-pragmatic Ability in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Adapted Version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

Ilaria Gabbatore, a GIPSI - research Group on Inferential Processes in Social Interaction, Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy;b Child Language Research Center, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

Claudio Longobardi, a GIPSI - research Group on Inferential Processes in Social Interaction, Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

Francesca M. Bosco

AbstractAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are lacking.

The present study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment for adolescents (A-CPT), a 15-session group training, as well as its ability to improve the communicative-pragmatic performance of adolescents with ASD. Twenty-one verbally fluent adolescents with ASD took part in the training; they were assessed in three phases, i.e., before, after and at three-month follow-up, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for testing a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, such as direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit and violation of Grice’s maxims, expressed through linguistic, non-verbal, i.e., gestures, or paralinguistic expressive means. Furthermore, Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks and tests investigating the main cognitive domains, for example, Executive Functions (planning, shifting, working memory) and long-term memory, were administered. The results showed an improvement in participants’ performance in all the four scales of the ABaCo, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic and context scale; this improvement was maintained at follow-up assessment three months after the end of the program. No improvement was observed in the cognitive and ToM domains investigated, with the only exception of expressive vocabulary task. Despite the lack of a control group, the high degree of feasibility of the CPT, highlight the importance of more work needed in this research line.

Consistency and Inconsistency in Caregiver Reporting of Vocabulary

Sudha Arunachalam, Valeryia Avtushka, Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, New York University, New York, USA

Rhiannon J. Luyster, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Emerson College, MA, Boston, USA

Whitney Guthrie, Center for Autism Research, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia, USA

AbstractVocabulary checklists completed by caregivers are a common way of measuring children’s vocabulary knowledge. We provide evidence from checklist data from 31 children with and without autism spectrum disorder. When asked to report twice about whether or not their child produces a particular word, caregivers are largely consistent in their responses, but where they are inconsistent, these inconsistencies affect verbs more than nouns. This difference holds both for caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder and caregivers of typically-developing children. We suggest that caregivers may be less sure of their child’s knowledge about verbs than nouns. This data converges with prior evidence comparing language samples of words children produce in a recorded interaction with checklist data, and it has implications for how researchers use checklist data in cases where the reliability of estimates of verb knowledge is critical.

How Adults and Children Interpret Disjunction under Negation in Dutch, French, Hungarian and Italian: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Elena Pagliarini, a DiSLL Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy

Oana Lungu, b Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS & Université de Nantes, Nantes, France

Angeliek van Hout, c Center for Language & Cognition Groningen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

Lilla Pintér, d Department of Hungarian Linguistics, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary;e Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary

Balázs Surányi, e Institute for General and Hungarian Linguistics, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary;f Department of Theoretical Linguistics, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary

Stephen Crain, g ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia

Maria Teresa Guasti, h Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

AbstractIn English, a sentence like “The cat didn’t eat the carrot or the pepper” typically receives a “neither” interpretation; in Japanese it receives a “not this or not that” interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the “neither” interpretation (strong reading) asymmetrically entails the “not this or not that” interpretation (weak reading). This asymmetrical entailment raises a learnability problem. According to the Semantic Subset Principle, all language learners, regardless of the language they are exposed to, start by assigning the strong reading, since this interpretation makes such sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances.). If the “neither” interpretation is children’s initial hypothesis, then children acquiring a superset language will be able to revise their initial hypothesis on the basis of positive evidence.

The aim of the present study is to test an additional account proposed by Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti (2018) as a possible explanation for the earlier convergence to the adult grammar by Italian children. The hypothesis tested here is that the presence of a lexical form such as recursive né that unambiguously conveys a “neither” meaning, would lead children to converge earlier to the adult grammar due to a blocking effect of the recursive né form in the inventory of negated disjunction forms in a language. We compared data from Italian (taken from Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti, 2018), French, Hungarian and Dutch. Dutch was tested as baseline language. French and Hungarian have – similarly to Italian – a lexical form that unambiguously expresses the “neither” interpretation (ni ni and sem sem, respectively). Our results did not support this hypothesis however, and are discussed in the light of language-specific particularities of the syntax and semantics of negation.

Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

Naomi Shin, Department of Linguistics and Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Karen Miller, Department of Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese, Center for Language Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only one of the variable forms (Step 1), producing both forms but in mutually-exclusive contexts (Step 2), then producing both forms in some overlapping linguistic contexts (Step 3), and finally producing both forms in more contexts (Step 4). The research reviewed indicates that input patterns are influential each step of the way, playing an important role in determining children’s use of forms as well as the contexts in which the forms are produced. In addition to considering input effects, we also draw on various tendencies that children evince in the face of variable input to explain the pathway of development, including regularization and assigning different meanings to different forms. The article also includes suggestions for testing the hypotheses generated by the proposed pathway of development, which we illustrate by drawing on the acquisition of variable Spanish subject pronoun expression.

Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency

Anisia Popescu, a Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition, Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Aude Noiray, a Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition, Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany;b Laboratoire Dynamique du Language, Lyon, France

AbstractUntil at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasound-based kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.

After the Null Subject Parameter: Acquisition of the Null-Overt Contrast in Spanish

Hannah Forsythe, a Language Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, USA

Daniel Greeson, Cristina Schmitt, b Linguistics and Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

AbstractIn many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person pronouns, whose reference is simpler to infer compared to 3rd person pronouns. We provide supporting evidence from spontaneous production and comprehension in Mexico City Spanish, showing that (i) the null/overt contrast is in principle acquirable from exclusively observing the referential preferences of 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns in caretaker speech; (ii) children themselves condition subject pronoun expression on pronoun reference in the 1st and 2nd persons before doing so in the 3rd person; and (iii) children use the null/overt contrast in comprehension at a similar age when they begin making this distinction in production.

The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners

Sybren Spit, Sible Andringa, Judith Rispens & Enoch O. Aboh, Faculty of Humanities, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a morpho-syntactic element. A total of 103 Dutch-speaking kindergartners (M = 5;7) received training in a miniature language to learn a meaningful agreement marker. Results from a picture matching task, during which eye movements were recorded, provided no evidence that explicit instruction led to higher accuracy rates, but suggest that it did lead to earlier predictive eye movements. These data seem incompatible with the idea that explicit instruction does not make a difference when kindergartners learn a grammatical element, and tentatively suggest that explicit instruction has a different effect on explicit knowledge than on implicit knowledge in this age group.

Ron Pomper, a Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA;b Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Margarita Kaushanskaya, b Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA;c Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Jenny Saffran, Ub Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA;c Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Abstract Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has demonstrated that EFs support language comprehension when there is conflict between competing, incompatible interpretations of temporarily ambiguous words or phrases. By engaging EFs, children and adults are able to select or bias their attention toward the correct interpretation. However, the degree to which language processing engages EFs in the absence of ambiguity is poorly understood. In the current experiment, we tested whether EFs may be engaged when comprehending speech that does not elicit conflicting interpretations. Different components of EFs were measured using several behavioral tasks and language comprehension was measured using an eye-tracking procedure. Five-year-old children (n = 56) saw pictures of familiar objects and heard sentences identifying the objects using either their names or colors. After a series of objects were identified using one dimension, children were significantly less accurate in fixating target objects that were identified using a second dimension. Further results reveal that this decrease in accuracy does not occur because children struggle to shift between dimensions, but rather because they are unable to predict which dimension will be used. These effects of predictability are related to individual differences in children’s EFs. Taken together, these findings suggest that EFs may be more broadly involved when children comprehend language, even in instances that do not require conflict resolution.

Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners

Alison C. Austin, Kathryn D. Schuler, Sarah Furlong, Elissa L. Newport, Georgetown University, Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Washington, DC, USA

Abstract When linguistic input contains inconsistent use of grammatical forms, children produce these forms more consistently, a process called “regularization.” Deaf children learning American Sign Language from parents who are non-native users of the language regularize their parents’ inconsistent usages. In studies of artificial languages containing inconsistently used morphemes, children, but not adults, regularized these forms. However, little is known about the precise circumstances in which such regularization occurs. In three experiments we investigate how the type of input variation and the age of learners affects regularization. Overall our results suggest that while adults tend to reproduce the inconsistencies found in their input, young children introduce regularity: they learn varying forms whose occurrence is conditioned and systematic, but they alter inconsistent variation to be more regular. Older children perform more like adults, suggesting that regularization changes with maturation and cognitive capacities.

Infants’ Sensitivity to Lexical Tone and Word Stress in Their First Year: A Thai and English Cross-Language Study

Marina Kalashnikova, a Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain;b The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia

Chutamanee Onsuwan, c MARCS-CILS NokHook BabyLab, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand

Denis Burnham, c MARCS-CILS NokHook BabyLab, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract Non-tone language infants’ native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants’ preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone cues) and two-syllable words (additionally containing stress cues). A preference for their native one-syllable words was observed in each of the two groups of infants, but this was not the case for two-syllable words where Thai-learning infants showed no native-language preference. These findings indicate that as early as six months of age, infants acquiring tone- and non-tone languages identify their native language by relying solely on lexical tone cues, but tone language infants no longer show successful identification of their native language when two pitch-based cues co-occur in the signal.

Culture at Play: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Mother-Child Communication during Toy Play

Sirada Rochanavibhata & Viorica Marian, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States of America

Abstract Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children’s linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai dyads. American and Thai mothers utilized unique sets of elicitation strategies to facilitate different aspects of children’s language development, specifically American mothers focused on children’s narrative skills whereas Thai mothers emphasized vocabulary learning. The two groups of children showed distinct patterns of conversation, for example, American children produced greater evaluative statements whereas Thai children repeated their mothers’ utterances more, which aligned with socialization goals of each respective culture. Mother-child narrative styles also differed as a function of child gender. Additionally, significant positive correlations were observed between maternal and child linguistic measures. These findings provide evidence for cross-cultural variation in communicative styles and toy play practices of American and Thai mother-child dyads, which reflect the social norms of individualistic and collectivist cultures. More broadly, the present study suggests that dyadic engagement during play is important for children’s development and socialization, as maternal speech transfers knowledge of culture-specific pragmatic rules that the children learn to apply in social interactions.

Linguistic Variation in the Acquisition of Morphosyntax: Variable Object Marking in the Speech of Mexican Children and Their Caregivers

M. Cole Callen & Karen Miller, a Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire than others do. The current study builds on this previous research using naturalistic corpus data to compare variable differential object marking in the speech of Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. While previous studies of adult speech have highlighted the variable use of the accusative object marker a, the variable distribution of the a-marker has been largely overlooked in studies of child Spanish. Our results show that preschool-age children use the same linguistic constraints as their caregivers when producing direct objects. We also found that younger children show different patterns of a-marking compared to older children and caregivers. These patterns suggest that the developmental trajectory of individual linguistic constraints depends on the distribution of variable contexts in the child’s input. Our findings highlight the importance of examining caregivers’ use of variable forms alongside children’s productions in language acquisition research.

Objects Shape Activation during Spoken Word Recognition in Preschoolers with Typical and Atypical Language Development: An Eye-tracking Study

Andrea Helo, a Departamento de Fonoaudiología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;b Departamento de Neurociencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;c Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación—CIAE, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Ernesto Guerra, a Departamento de Fonoaudiología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;b Departamento de Neurociencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;c Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación—CIAE, Universidad de 

Chile, Santiago, Chile, a Departamento de Fonoaudiología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;c Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación—CIAE, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile;d Instituto de Educación—IE, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Carmen Julia Coloma, a Departamento de Fonoaudiología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

María Antonia Reyes, e Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (UMR8002), CNRS, Université de Paris, Paris, France

Abstract Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape) representations. Two types of trials were presented in each experiment. In Experiment 1, participants heard a word while seeing (1) an object visually associated with the spoken word (i.e., shape competitor) together with a phonologically related object (i.e., cohort competitor), or (2) a shape competitor with an unrelated object. In Experiment 2 and 3, participants heard a word while seeing (1) a shape competitor with an object semantically related to the spoken word (i.e., semantic competitor), or (2) a shape competitor with an unrelated object. In Experiment 4, children heard a word while seeing a semantic competitor with (1) the visual referent of the spoken or (2) with an unrelated object. The visual context was previewed for three seconds before the spoken word, except for Experiment 2, where it appeared at the onset of the spoken word (i.e., no preview). The results showed that when a preview was provided both groups were equally attracted by cohort and semantic competitors and preferred the shape competitors over the unrelated objects. However, shape preference disappeared in the DLD group when no preview was provided and when the shape competitor was presented with a semantic competitor. Our results indicate that children with DLD have a less efficient retrieval of shape representation during word recognition compared to typically developing children.

Difference or Delay? Syntax, Semantics, and Verb Vocabulary Development in Typically Developing and Late-talking Toddlers

Sabrina Horvath, Justin B. Kueser, Jaelyn Kelly & Arielle Borovsky, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States

Abstract While semantic and syntactic properties of verb meaning can impact the success of verb learning at a single age, developmental changes in how these factors influence acquisition are largely unexplored. We ask whether the impact of syntactic and semantic properties on verb vocabulary development varies with age and language ability for toddlers aged 16 to 30 months in a large sample (N = 5520, NLate Talkers = 821; NTypically Developing = 4699, cutoff = 15th percentile) of vocabulary checklist data from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MBCDI). Verbs from the MBCDI were coded for their syntactic and semantic properties, including manner/result meanings, durative/punctual events, and syntactic complexity. Both late talkers and typically developing children were less likely to produce syntactically complex verbs at younger ages as compared to older ages. Group differences emerged for manner/result: Typically developing children were more likely to produce manner verbs at all ages, but late talkers were more likely to produce result verbs. Regardless of group, children who produced more manner versus result verbs also had larger verb vocabulary sizes overall. These results suggest that late talkers and typically developing toddlers differ in how they build their verb vocabularies.

The Impact of Auditory Perceptual Training on the Perception and Production of English Vowels by Cypriot Greek Children and Adults

Georgios P. Georgiou, a Department of Languages and Literature, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus;b Department of Foreign Languages, RUDN University, Moscow, Russia

Abstract  The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of auditory perceptual phonetic training on the identification and production of English vowels by Cypriot Greek children and adults. Another two groups of Cypriot Greek child and adult speakers served as controls. The trained groups participated in the pretest, training, and posttest phase, while the controls completed only the pretest and posttest phase. The results showed that perceptual training improved identification accuracy, with children showing greater gains than adults. Although the performance of adults was poorer than the performance of children, their phonological system did undergo substantial alteration through perceptual phonetic training as they significantly improved their identifications in the posttest. Also, the results support a common mental space for the speech perception and production domains since the perceptually-oriented training affected the learners’ productions. However, transfer of improvements in production was observed only to some extent in children and not in adults, suggesting that training has an impact mostly on the trained modality and that some production improvement after perceptual training might be more evident in younger learners.

Cross-generational Phonetic Alignment between Mothers and Their Children

Thomas St. Pierre, Angela Cooper, a Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada

Elizabeth K. Johnson, a Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada

Abstract Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon – known as phonetic alignment – has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns in intergenerational, adult-child dyads. In the current study, we investigated alignment between mothers and their children in a picture-naming task, as assessed using a perceptual similarity task and acoustic measures. Experiments 1 and 2 examined alignment in 2.5- and 4-year-old children and their mothers, both when mothers shadowed their children (Experiment 1), and when children shadowed their mothers (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 investigated long-term similarity between mothers and children when they were recorded separately. Results show that children and mothers aligned to one another in the shadowing task, regardless of who shadowed whom, and while there was no evidence for long-term alignment in younger children, there was some evidence of long-term alignment with 8-year-old children and their moms, but only for male children.

Poverty of the Stimulus Without Tears

Lisa Pearl, Poverty of the Stimulus Without Tears

Abstract Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it’s been interpreted, which is traditionally where the tears have come in. I discuss poverty of the stimulus from the perspective of language development, highlighting how poverty of the stimulus relates to expectations about learning and the data available to learn from. I describe common interpretations of what poverty of the stimulus means when it occurs, and approaches for determining when poverty of the stimulus is in fact occurring. I close with illustrative examples of poverty of the stimulus in the domains of syntax, lexical semantics, and phonology, and discuss the value of identifying instances of poverty of the stimulus when it comes to understanding language development.

The Type of Feedback Provided Can Affect Morphological Rule Learning of Young Children

Sara Ferman, Sapir Amira Shmuel & Yael Zaltz, Department of Communication Disorders, The Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Abstract The acquisition of a new morphological rule can be influenced by numerous factors, including the type of feedback provided during learning. The present study aimed to test the effect of different feedback types on children’s ability to learn and generalize an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Two groups of eight-year-olds learned to judge and produce repeated and new (generalization) items representing the AMR during ten training sessions. One group (n = 7) received only corrective feedback, that is, heard “the correct answer is … ” after each incorrect answer, whereas the other group (n = 8) received corrective feedback following verification feedback, that is, heard “incorrect, the correct answer is … .” Performance in terms of accuracy and reaction times was compared to that of an additional eight-year-old group (n = 8) from a previous study who received only verification feedback, that is, heard “incorrect” following each incorrect answer. The data analysis that was conducted for all three groups (N = 23 total), with ten observations for each child revealed that corrective feedback improved implicit learning of the AMR and in some cases also allowed generalization to new items. The combination of verification and corrective feedback, however, yielded the best performance in generalizing the AMR, possibly by stimulating both implicit and explicit processes. These preliminary findings suggest that corrective feedback, and even more so combined corrective+verification feedback, can enhance procedural and declarative learning processes of young school-age children. Future studies may be necessary to test this inference in a larger group of school-age children, and across ages.

Erin Conwell, a Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, North Dakota, North Dakota

Felix Pichardo, a Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, North Dakota, North Dakota

Gregor Horvath, b Now at Rogers Behavioral Health, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

Amanda Lopez, c Now at Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado

Abstract Children’s ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children’s learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a pseudohomophone) has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when children entertain a new meaning for a familiar word. One such factor is repetition of the new meaning and another is the acoustic differentiation of the two meanings. This study asked 72 4-year-old English-learning children to assign novel meanings to familiar words and manipulated how many times they heard the words with their new referents as well as whether the productions were acoustically longer than typical productions of the words. Repetition supported the learning of a pseudohomophone, but acoustic differentiation did not.

Home Literacy Environment and English as A Second Language Acquisition: A Meta-analysis

Yang Dong, a Department of English, Hainan University, Haikou, China;b Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow, c Department of Language and Cognition, University College London, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Abstract This paper is a quantitative synthesis of research on home literacy environment (HLE) and children’s English as a second language (ESL) learning outcomes through a meta-analysis of 18 articles in kindergarten, primary, and secondary school students (N = 4401) carried out between 2000 and 2018. It examines the associations between HLE factors and children’s ESL performance. Results showed the effect sizes between HLE factors and children’s ESL performance was small to moderate. Family members shared a similar effect size on children’s ESL performance. Parental literacy teaching behaviors have stronger effects on children’s ESL ability than parental beliefs on their children’s English learning and the availability of learning resources at home. These results highlight the importance of HLE and indicate the relative contributions of specific HLE factors on children’s ESL acquisition.

期刊简介

Language Learning and Development (LL&D) serves as a vehicle for interaction among the broad community of scholars and practitioners who investigate language learning, including language learning in infancy, childhood, and across the lifespan; language in both typical and atypical populations and in both native- and second-language learning. LL&D welcomes scholars who pursue diverse approaches to understanding all aspects of language acquisition, including biological, social, and cross-cultural influences, and who employ experimental, observational, ethnographic, comparative, neuroscientific, and formal methods of investigation.

语言学习与发展（LL&D）是研究语言学习（包括婴儿期、儿童期和整个生命周期的语言学习）的广大学者和实践者社区之间互动的工具；典型和非典型人群以及母语和第二语言学习中的语言。LL&D欢迎采用不同方法了解语言习得各个方面的学者，包括生物、社会和跨文化影响，以及采用实验、观察、人种学、比较、神经科学和正式调查方法的学者。

The journal is multidisciplinary and seeks to examine language development in all of its many guises. Among the many issues LL&D explores are biological versus environmental factors in language development; learning in humans versus animals; learning of signed versus spoken language; computer models of learning; and how neurotechnology and visualization of the brain inform our understanding of language learning and development.

该杂志是多学科的，旨在研究各种形式的语言发展。在LL&D探索的众多问题中，有语言发展中的生物因素与环境因素；人类与动物的学习；学习手语与口语；计算机学习模型；以及神经技术和大脑可视化如何帮助我们理解语言学习和发展。

官网地址：

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/hlld20

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