4-5-year-old children adapt to the reliability of conflicting sources of information to learn novel words

Abstract

A central challenge in language acquisition is the integration of multiple sources of information, potentially in conflict, to acquire new knowledge and adjust current linguistic representations. One way to accomplish this is to assign more weight to more reliable sources of information in context. We test the hypothesis that children adjust the weight of different sources of information during learning, considering two specific sources of information: their knowledge of the meaning of familiar words (semantics) and their familiarity with syntax. We varied the reliability of these sources of information through an induction phase (reliable-syntax or reliable-semantics). At test, French 4-5-year-old children and adults listened to sentences where information provided by these two cues conflicted, and were asked to choose between two videos that illustrate the sentence. One video presented the reasonable choice if the sentence is assumed to be syntactically correct, but familiar words refer to novel things (e.g., une mange - "an eats" describes a novel object). The other video was the reasonable choice if the sentence is assumed to be syntactically incorrect and familiar words’ meaning is preserved (e.g., "an eats" describes a girl eating, and should have actually been "she eats"). As predicted, the proportion of syntactic choices (e.g., interpreting mange - "eats", as a novel noun) was found to be higher in the reliable-syntax condition than in the reliable-semantics condition, showing that children and adults can adapt their expectations to the reliability of sources of information.

18‐month‐olds fail to use recent experience to infer the syntactic category of novel words

“…With that said, recent years have seen multiple publications describing weaker prediction or prediction adaptation the younger the participants (Barrault, Havron, Dautriche, Babineau, de Carvalho, Christophe, in preparation ; Beretti et al, 2020; Gambi, Gorrie, Pickering, & Rabagliati, 2018; Havron et al, 2019). Furthermore, recent studies have failed to replicate high‐profile adult studies showing fine‐grained syntactic adaptation (Harrington Stack et al, 2018; Liu, Burchill, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2017).…”

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

“…Such top-down cues include lexical-semantic information about specific words (e.g., verb restrictions, MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg, 1994), knowledge about the real world (e.g., action-goal relations, Kamide, Altmann & Haywood, 2003), and pragmatic inferences about speakers' intentions, which are often related to and modulated by the broader discourse context (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Otten & Van Berkum, 2008;Tylén et al, 2015). While the relative contribution of bottom-up vs. top-down information in language processing has been the subject of longstanding debate (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;Christiansen & Chater, 2016;Kintsch, 2005;Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978;Roark, 2001), recent work suggests that top-down processes become especially relevant when the quality of acoustic-phonetic information decreases (e.g., Beretti et al, 2020;Chodroff & Wilson, 2020;Szostak & Pitt, 2013;Bushong & Jaeger, 2017;Borsky, Tuller & Shapiro, 1998;Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 2001). Motivated by recent evidence from Danish and Norwegian (Ishkhanyan et al, 2019;Trecca et al, 2019), we here explore whether the balance between bottom-up and top-down processes might also be affected by cross-linguistic differences between these two languages.…”