Contributions of infant word learning to language development

Swingley, Daniel

doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0107

Cited by 179 publications

(179 citation statements)

References 116 publications

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“…Slightly different sounds that occur with a single word form will result in a single phoneme, whereas slightly different sounds that occur with two distinct word forms will result in two distinct phonemes. A learning mechanism that uses this lexical information yields a more accurate set of phonemes than models that learn phonemes from only the auditory distributions (for a similar position, see Swingley, 2009). That infants may use lexical information when learning phonological categories is supported by experimental evidence with 8-and 11-month-old infants Feldman, Myers, White, Griffiths, & Morgan, 2013, Thiessen, 2011 Feldman, Myers et al, 2013).…”

Section: Semantics-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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Semantics guide infants' vowel learning: computational and experimental evidenceter Schure, S.M.M.; Junge, C.M.M.; Boersma, P.P.G. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. a b s t r a c tIn their first year, infants' perceptual abilities zoom in on only those speech sound contrasts that are relevant for their language. Infants' lexicons do not yet contain sufficient minimal pairs to explain this phonetic categorization process. Therefore, researchers suggested a bottom-up learning mechanism: infants create categories aligned with the frequency distributions of sounds in their input. Recent evidence shows that this bottom-up mechanism may be complemented by the semantic context in which speech sounds occur, such as simultaneously present objects. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discrimination of a non-native vowel contrast improves when sounds from the contrast were paired consistently or randomly with two distinct visually presented objects, while the distribution of speech tokens suggested a single broad category. This was assessed in two ways: computationally, namely in a neural network simulation, and experimentally, namely in a group of 8-month-old infants. The neural network, trained with a large set of sound-meaning pairs, revealed that two categories emerge only if sounds are consistently paired with objects. A group of 49 real 8-month-old infants did not immediately show sensitivity to the pairing condition; a later test at 18 months with some of the same infants, however, showed that this sensitivity at 8 months interacted with their vocabulary size at 18 months. This interaction can be explained by the idea that infants with larger future vocabularies are more positively influenced by consistent training (and/or more negatively influenced by inconsistent training) than infants with smaller future vocabularies. This suggests that consistent pairing with distinct visual objects can help infants to discriminate speech sounds even when the auditory information does not signal a distinction. Together our results give computational as well as experimental support for the idea that semantic context plays a role in disambiguating phonetic auditory input.

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Section: Semantics-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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“…This is happening before a vocabulary has been initiated and before the native phoneme inventory has been settled upon. Knowing the phoneme categories can obviously aid compilation of a vocabulary (23), and knowing words can aid definition of the phoneme categories (24,25). Thus, when the infant brain has matured to the point at which sound/word pairings are being tentatively assessed, for instance, on the basis of statistically likely clusterings of syllables (61), these mutually assisting processes cooperate to produce the rapid progress toward each goal, vocabulary and phoneme repertoire, that we see in the second half of the first year (26).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The acquisition of an initial vocabulary and of the native phoneme repertoire in the same general time period made for an attractive scenario in which the two activities were seen as linked, (i) in that mastering the phoneme repertoire gave information about which different sequences were actually different words rather than alternative ways of saying the same word (23), (ii) in that compiling a repertoire of words gave information about ways in which words could minimally differ (24,25), or (iii) in that the two processes acting together ensured optimal progress toward successful speech processing (26). However, recent studies have pushed the threshold of word recognition to an earlier time point: segmentation of running speech (27,28) and recognition of words referring to familiar people and concepts (29,30) have been demonstrated in infants of 6 mo or younger, and neural precursors of word recognition have been observed even at 3 mo (31).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

Choi

Broersma

Cutler

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Until at least 6 mo of age, infants show good discrimination for familiar phonetic contrasts (i.e., those heard in the environmental language) and contrasts that are unfamiliar. Adult-like discrimination (significantly worse for nonnative than for native contrasts) appears only later, by 9-10 mo. This has been interpreted as indicating that infants have no knowledge of phonology until vocabulary development begins, after 6 mo of age. Recently, however, word recognition has been observed before age 6 mo, apparently decoupling the vocabulary and phonology acquisition processes. Here we show that phonological acquisition is also in progress before 6 mo of age. The evidence comes from retention of birth-language knowledge in international adoptees. In the largest ever such study, we recruited 29 adult Dutch speakers who had been adopted from Korea when young and had no conscious knowledge of Korean language at all. Half were adopted at age 3-5 mo (before nativespecific discrimination develops) and half at 17 mo or older (after word learning has begun). In a short intensive training program, we observe that adoptees (compared with 29 matched controls) more rapidly learn tripartite Korean consonant distinctions without counterparts in their later-acquired Dutch, suggesting that the adoptees retained phonological knowledge about the Korean distinction. The advantage is equivalent for the younger-adopted and the olderadopted groups, and both groups not only acquire the tripartite distinction for the trained consonants but also generalize it to untrained consonants. Although infants younger than 6 mo can still discriminate unfamiliar phonetic distinctions, this finding indicates that native-language phonological knowledge is nonetheless being acquired at that age.language acquisition | adoption | phonology | language memory T o talk to others, and to understand what others say, we need to know the phonological structure of the language we are using. Phonology embraces, for instance, the single-sound contrasts that distinguish one word from another, or the sequence constraints that apply to sounds; so if we are speaking English, we need to distinguish rye from lie, and if we hear [m] followed immediately by [b], we know that they belong to different syllables, as in somebody. Neither assumption holds for all languages. Phonological knowledge is highly language-specific.It is also abstract: not so much knowledge of the sounds and words in the language, but knowledge about those sounds and words, and the rules that govern them. Such knowledge is constantly called into play in adult talking and listening. When talkers must repeat others' utterances, they repeat the sounds that are said, but do so by using their own accent, not by imitating the accent in which the sounds are said (1). If talkers are exposed to novel phoneme sequence constraints in perception, they quickly apply them in production (2). In slips of the tongue, transposed elements accommodate to the new rather than to the originally intended phonetic context, su...

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“…In the latter, the unaccented determiner is usually stripped off, leaving the noun to be detected. 5 More precisely this is a combined effect of the statistical and prosodic procedures described earlier. The statistical procedure splits the two-word NP into a determiner and a noun, while the relative prosodic prominence picks up the noun.…”

Section: ) Data Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our model proposes a three stage process: word form detection, word-denotation association and grammar induction. Empirical evidence suggests that infants recognise and can produce frequently coherent sound sequences without meaning, prior to speaking [5]. Their earliest speech productions then are typically single-word utterances where the words are generally restricted to content words, later progressing to multi-word utterances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An integrated three-stage model towards grammar acquisition

Sato

Saunders

Broz

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE 9th International Conference on Development and Learning

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Abstract-This paper presents a three-stage model of language acquisition that integrates phonological, semantic and syntactic aspects of language learning. With the assumption that these three stages arise roughly in sequence, we test the model using the experimental methodology of cognitive robotics, where an emphasis is placed on situating the robot in a realistic, interactive environment. The first, phonological stage consists in learning sound patterns that are likely to correspond to words. The second stage concerns word-denotation association, which relies not only on sensory input but also on the learner's speech output in 'dialogue'. The data thus gathered allows us to invoke semantic bootstrapping in the third, grammar induction stage, where sets of words are mapped with simple logical types. We have started implementing the model and report here on the initial results of the human-robot interaction experiments we conducted.

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Contributions of infant word learning to language development

Cited by 179 publications

References 116 publications

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention

An integrated three-stage model towards grammar acquisition

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