Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters

Abstract

Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2007, 2002). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label because its neighbor dog is also an object. In three experiments, French 18-month-olds were taught novel words whose word forms were phonologically similar to familiar nouns (noun-neighbors), to familiar verbs (verb-neighbors) or to nothing (no-neighbors). Toddlers successfully learned the no-neighbors and verb-neighbors but failed to learn the noun-neighbors, although both novel neighbors had a familiar phonological neighbor in the toddlers’ lexicon. We conclude that when creating a novel lexical entry, toddlers’ evaluation of similarity in the lexicon is multidimensional, incorporating both phonological and semantic or syntactic features.

Two-year-olds interpret novel phonological neighbors as familiar words.

“…Or, more broadly speaking, children might consider, consciously or not, a wide range of features of the situation in estimating the probability that the form corresponds to a novel word—in particular, the likelihood that a novel object label would be introduced in the presence of a similar-sounding alternative (cf. Dautriche et al, 2015). …”

“…In addition, younger children (1.5-year-olds) do not treat a novel phonological neighbor of a familiar word as lexically novel even when given apparently unassailable evidence supporting this interpretation (Swingley & Aslin, 2007; though see Dautriche, Swingley, & Christophe, 2015). Creel (2012) tested substantially older children, in a potentially more complex task involving 4 pictured alternatives.…”

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners

“…A few studies suggest that children do not take word forms that belong to different syntactic categories as tokens of the same word or morpheme (e.g., Dautriche, Fibla, & Christophe, 2015; Dautriche, Swingley, & Christophe, 2015; Hall, Lee, & Bélanger, 2001; Katz, Baker, & Macnamara, 1974). In particular, recent studies teaching toddlers novel meanings for known words (e.g., “an eat” to refer to an animal rather than an action of eating), found that children have no difficulties learning homophones when either the meaning or the syntactic category differ (Dautriche, Fibla, et al, 2015; Dautriche, Swingley, et al, 2015). Therefore, the uses of “yi” in non-cardinal compounds are unlikely to interfere with the acquisition of the meaning of the number word “yi.” We address this issue in greater detail in the general discussion.…”

Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis.

“…[43] with [44]). Therefore, our data were analysed using a permutation test technique that was originally developed for use with time-course data, such as ERP data, for which it is difficult to know a priori which time regions are relevant and which statistical corrections for multiple comparisons are required ([46]; see [47][48][49] for use with the eye-tracking-while-listening paradigm with children). The first step involved computing the test statistic on the real data for each possible time point (in our case the 20-msec timebins created via Matlab).…”

“…Following recent developments within the eye-tracking-while-listening paradigm ( [47][48][49]), we used permutation analysis to analyse the eye-tracking data. This allows us to avoid pre-specifying the analysis windows whilst simultaneously correcting for multiple comparisons (see [46]), and to avoid making assumptions regarding by how much we should offset our data analyses to allow for differences in processing speed-a particular problem when comparing across developmental groups.…”