Children Probably Store Short Rather Than Frequent or Predictable Chunks: Quantitative Evidence From a Corpus Study

Abstract

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to actual words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences—not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences.

Tailoring the Input to Children's Needs: The Use of Fine Lexical Tuning in Speech Directed to Normally Hearing Children and Children With Cochlear Implants

“…Other studies have also found a positive learning effect of words in isolation (Ninio, 2016;Swingley and Humphrey, 2018;Keren-Portnoy et al, 2019). In addition to words in isolation, shorter utterances are also helpful for learning words according to previous research (Swingley and Humphrey, 2018;Grimm et al, 2019). Single-word utterances may even be more beneficial to CI children, because the task of isolating a word in an utterance is easier when the word occurs in isolation as opposed to surrounded by other words.…”

“…For instance, infants have more difficulties segmenting words from fluent speech (Mattys and Jusczyk, 2001;Seidl and Johnson, 2006) than words uttered in short utterances or words spoken in isolation, because these words appear to be easier to segment and thus to learn. Indeed, research has shown that words that occur frequently in short utterances in IDS are produced earlier by children (Grimm et al, 2019). Moreover, words uttered frequently in isolation by their parents appear to be easier to acquire.…”

Fine lexical tuning in infant directed speech to typically developing children

“…The frequency of hearing a word in isolation was a better predictor of word learning than the total frequency of that word's exposure (see also Keren-Portnoy et al, 2019; Ninio, 2016; Swingley & Humphrey, 2018). Next to words in isolation, shorter utterances are also helpful for learning words (Grimm et al, 2019; Swingley & Humphrey, 2018). These results are in line with the finding of the present study that parents’ MLU decreases around the time a word is first produced, a finding similar to the one reported by Roy et al (2009) in a case study.…”

“…Not only words in isolation are helpful for learning words, but also shorter utterances. Grimm, Cassani, Gillis, and Daelemans (2019) showed that the more a word occurs in short utterances in IDS, the earlier that word is produced by the child. Shorter utterances are better for predicting the time course of when a word is learned than a word's overall frequency.…”

Corpus-based age of word acquisition: Does it support the validity of adult age-of-acquisition ratings?

“…To our knowledge, the corpus-based AoA has been previously used only by Grimm et al [ 48 , 49 ] (who label it as the age of first production—AoFP). Both studies investigated a similar topic, namely in what unit children’s language is segmented, with AoFP serving as a dependent variable tracking children’s word learning.…”