Early word-object associations and later language development

Bernhardt, Barbara May; Kemp, Nenagh; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.1177/0142723707081652

Cited by 35 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…To summarize, our findings add to the growing body of research that shows that measures of processing linguistic information obtained early in life correlates with later language development (Bernhardt, Kemp, & Werker, ; Fernald, Perfors, & Marchman, ; Höhle, van de Vijver, & Weissenborn, ). An early assessment of prosodic skills—which is one of the earliest perceptual abilities that can be tested in infants—may indicate children at risk for developing a language‐related impairment.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German‐Learning Children

Höhle

Pauen

Hesse³

et al. 2014

Language Learning

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In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty‐four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic sequences when they were 4 months old. At 5 years of age, standardized measures on language performance (SETK3–5) and nonverbal intelligence (SON‐R) were obtained. Overall, evidence of discrimination of the rhythmic patterns was found only for children without a family risk. The performance in early rhythmic discrimination correlated with the later outcomes in SETK3–5 subtests on sentence comprehension and morphological skills, but not with subtests related to memory performance nor with nonverbal intelligence. Our results suggest that indicators of language development can be discovered as early as 4 months of age, and seem to correlate with later outcomes in rather specific language skills.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German‐Learning Children

Höhle

Pauen

Hesse³

et al. 2014

Language Learning

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“…For instance, a longitudinal design with typically-developing children could help determine if implicit learning abilities predict subsequent speech and language abilities assessed several years later (see Bernhardt, Kemp, & Werker, 2007; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989; Newman, Bernstein Ratner, Jusczyk, Jusczyk, & Dow, 2006; Tsao, Liu, & Kuhl, 2004). Such a finding would provide support for the hypothesis that implicit learning plays a causal role in language development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit statistical learning in language processing: Word predictability is the key☆

Bauernschmidt²,

et al. 2010

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Fundamental learning abilities related to the implicit encoding of sequential structure have been postulated to underlie language acquisition and processing. However, there is very little direct evidence to date supporting such a link between implicit statistical learning and language. In three experiments using novel methods of assessing implicit learning and language abilities, we show that sensitivity to sequential structure -- as measured by improvements to immediate memory span for structurally-consistent input sequences -- is significantly correlated with the ability to use knowledge of word predictability to aid speech perception under degraded listening conditions. Importantly, the association remained even after controlling for participant performance on other cognitive tasks, including short-term and working memory, intelligence, attention and inhibition, and vocabulary knowledge. Thus, the evidence suggests that implicit learning abilities are essential for acquiring long-term knowledge of the sequential structure of language -- i.e., knowledge of word predictability – and that individual differences on such abilities impact speech perception in everyday situations. These findings provide a new theoretical rationale linking basic learning phenomena to specific aspects of spoken language processing in adults, and may furthermore indicate new fruitful directions for investigating both typical and atypical language development.

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“…Indeed, performance in the minimal pair Switch task at 17 -18 months is correlated with both concurrent (Kemp et al submitted) and later (Bernhardt et al 2007) measures of vocabulary size and language development more generally. We now turn to studies of minimal pair word-learning in bilinguals to examine what this research has revealed about the microstructure of bilingual acquisition.…”

Section: Same Trialmentioning

confidence: 98%

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

Werker

Byers‐Heinlein

Fennell

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

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At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. 'cat' and 'mat'). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.

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Early word-object associations and later language development

Cited by 35 publications

References 37 publications

Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German‐Learning Children

Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German‐Learning Children

Implicit statistical learning in language processing: Word predictability is the key☆

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

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