Experience and maturation: The contribution of co‐occurrence regularities in language to the development of semantic organization

Savic, Olivera; Unger, Layla; Sloutsky, Vladimir M.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13844

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Previous research on monolingual young children suggests that when they encounter a new word, it initially represents an episodic experience but must undergo integration into their mental lexicon for effective communication (Sobczak and Gaskell, 2019;Tartaro et al, 2021). Research also showed that monolingual children undergo a developmental transition from initially prioritizing thematic relations, rooted in word co-occurrence patterns, to later emphasizing taxonomic relationships based on shared characteristics (Nelson and Nelson, 1990;Unger et al, 2016;Savic et al, 2023). Initially, children tend to prioritize thematic relations, connecting words like "dog" with "bone" or "bark" because of frequent co-occurrence in their experiences.…”

Section: Semantic Development In Heritage Bilingual Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

Kan,

Yim,

Brennan

2024

Front. Lang. Sci.

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This study investigates the semantic development of heritage bilingual preschool children aged 3 to 5 who acquire Cantonese as their heritage language (HL) at home and English as their community language (L2) in school settings. The research examines how bilingual children organize and access their vocabulary in two distinct languages and how their heritage language influences semantic development in L2. We examined their performance in Word Association Identification Task (WAID) and Word Association Task (WAT) in both languages. Results showed that they perform similarly in WAID in both languages, with higher accuracy in semantically unrelated conditions. The WAT results showed that children had more syntagmatic responses in Cantonese than in English, but had similar paradigmatic responses in both languages. Regression analysis revealed that paradigmatic responses in Cantonese predicted children's English paradigmatic responses. Their English paradigmatic responses were also associated with WAID performance in English. This study contributes to understanding heritage bilingual children's semantic development, with implications for education and language support.

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Section: Semantic Development In Heritage Bilingual Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

Kan,

Yim,

Brennan

2024

Front. Lang. Sci.

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“…In contrast, for the pure distributional cue on its own, it is not clear that there is any additional information (syntactic or extra-linguistic) that would help children induce the conceptual hierarchy beyond information about word co-occurrence. On this account, the accumulation of direct co-occurrence in children's memory (e.g., "fruits"-"hungry" and "vegetables"-"hungry") leads to the realization (perhaps triggered by cognitive maturation, e.g., Bauer & San Souci, 2010;Savic, et al, 2023) that some words share similar pattern of co-occurrence (e.g., that "fruits" and "vegetables" co-occur in similar linguistic contexts; in this example, they both co-occur with "hungry"), which then foster the creation of a taxonomic -rather than a thematic -link (i.e., "fruits" and "vegetables" are instances of a single higher-level conceptual category, e.g., "food") (Brown & Berko, 1960;Ervin, 1961;McNeill, 1963;Sloutsky et al, 2017). It is still not entirely clear what precise mechanistic process can explain how sensitivity to shared patterns of co-occurrence between two labels may give rise to a taxonomic link relating these labels to a single superordinate category, supporting conceptual inference and knowledge generalization.…”

Section: Possible Learning Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is still not entirely clear what precise mechanistic process can explain how sensitivity to shared patterns of co-occurrence between two labels may give rise to a taxonomic link relating these labels to a single superordinate category, supporting conceptual inference and knowledge generalization. We refer the reader to Unger CONCEPTUAL HIERARCHY IN CDS 20 and Fisher (2021) and Savic et al (2023) for a review and discussion of some hypothesized mechanisms based on behavioral, computational, and/or neuroscientific evidence.…”

Section: Possible Learning Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Hierarchy in Child-Directed Speech: Implicit Cues are More Reliable

Wilson

Frank

Fourtassi

2023

Journal of Cognition and Development

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In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important role in this learning.Previous studies have documented several cues in parental talk that can help children learn about conceptual hierarchy. However, these studies have used different datasets and methods that have made it difficult to compare the relative usefulness of various linguistic cues to conceptual knowledge and to test whether they scale up to naturalistic speech. Here, we study a large-scale corpus of English child-directed speech -collected in North America and the UK -and used a unified classification-based evaluation method which allowed us to investigate and compare cues that vary in terms of how explicit the information they offer is.We found the more explicit cues to be too sparse or too noisy in child-directed speech, making them unlikely to support robust learning. In contrast, the implicit cues offered a more reliable source of information. Further, we investigated developmental changes from 3 to 6 years of age, and we found no differences in the availability of these cues in the input.Our work confirms the utility of caregiver talk for conveying conceptual information and supporting the development of early taxonomic knowledge. It provides a first step toward a cognitive model that would combine perceptual-and language-based mechanisms, leading to a more comprehensive account of children's conceptual development.

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Learning to Read Connections—Sensitivity to Collocation Frequency Links Vocabulary Size and Reading Comprehension in Middle Childhood

Schmitterer,

Gawrilow,

Friedrich

2024

Reading Research Quarterly

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The collocation frequency of words in the language environment contributes to early vocabulary development. Vocabulary size, in turn, predicts children's reading comprehension skills later in development. Both collocation frequency and reading comprehension have been connected to inferential reasoning at different time points in development. Here, it was hypothesized that 8‐year‐old children's (N = 147; 76 female) sensitivity to collocation frequency would be related to vocabulary size and reading comprehension skills of varying complexity. Participants completed an auditory thematic judgment task to assess their sensitivity to collocation frequency (response accuracy or speed). In the task, children were presented with a short sentence containing a reference word (e.g., “John sees the cloud.”) and asked to judge which of two subsequent words best fit the sentence (e.g., “rain” or “lip”). Semantic relatedness between reference words and test words was operationalized in three levels (strong, weak, and distant) based on a corpus‐based analysis of collocation frequency. Multilevel and mediation analyses confirmed that thematic judgment responses were related to corpus‐based measures of collocation frequency and were associated with vocabulary size and reading comprehension skills at the sentence and text level. Furthermore, thematic judgment predicted vocabulary size and reading comprehension when the relation of decoding and reading comprehension was taken into account. The study highlights sensitivity to collocation frequency as a link between early language comprehension development (i.e., lexical retrieval and inferential reasoning) and reading comprehension in middle childhood. It also integrates theoretical approaches from computational network or distributional semantics studies and behavioral experimental studies.

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Experience and maturation: The contribution of co‐occurrence regularities in language to the development of semantic organization

Cited by 5 publications

References 97 publications

Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

Conceptual Hierarchy in Child-Directed Speech: Implicit Cues are More Reliable

Learning to Read Connections—Sensitivity to Collocation Frequency Links Vocabulary Size and Reading Comprehension in Middle Childhood

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