Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants’ Word‐Learning Assumptions

Kandhadai, Padmapriya; Hall, D. Geoffrey; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13626

Cited by 9 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…At least by 11 months, monolingual English-exposed infants associated faces of East Asian women with hearing Cantonese (May et al, 2019), indicating that they use the specific language spoken as a cue to a person's identity in some cases. Further studies also show that monolingual infants take the speaker's race into account in language processing tasks (Singh et al, 2020;Weatherhead et al, 2021). These studies further underline that infants pay attention to the social context of language use.…”

Section: Evidence For Sophisticated Reasoning About Language In Socia...mentioning

confidence: 60%

Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?

Schott¹,

Tamayo²,

Byers‐Heinlein³

2022

Preprint

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Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one-person-one-language approach in an attempt to not ‘confuse’ their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and monolingual 5-, 12- and 18-month-olds spontaneously form language-person associations. In both studies, infants were familiarized to a man and a woman, each speaking a different language, and tested on trials where they either spoke the same language or switched to a different language. In Study 1, infants only heard the speaker, and in Study 2 infants saw and heard the speaker. Bilinguals and monolinguals did not look longer to Switch compared to Same trials; thus, there was no evidence that infants form person-language associations spontaneously. This indicates that at least early in development, a central assumption of the one-person-one-language approach is not supported.

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Section: Evidence For Sophisticated Reasoning About Language In Socia...mentioning

confidence: 60%

Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?

Schott¹,

Tamayo²,

Byers‐Heinlein³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Children may therefore be able to leverage this social knowledge when learning language. We see examples of this in the context of word learning when children show flexibility in applying the mutual exclusivity heuristic in accordance with the social conditions under which new words are introduced (e.g., Weatherhead et al, 2021), and here, too, children's shifts from CDL to ADL vocabulary are likely supported by their emerging knowledge about the contexts in which different registers are used.…”

Section: Developing Linguistic and Social Knowledge In Tandemmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…That is, differences in register could serve to 'explain away' the otherwise problematic redundancy of multiple labels in these pairs (Clark, 1990). Indirect evidence for this idea comes from findings that the mutual exclusivity effect is modulated by children's experience with multiple languages (Byers-Heinlein & Werker, 2009;Houston-Price, Caloghiris, & Raviglione, 2010) as well as the social conditions under which multiple labels are introduced (e.g., by speakers of a familiar or unfamiliar race: Weatherhead et al, 2021). Further, children's modifications to their own speech when talking to infants and younger children (Sachs & Devin, 1976;Shatz & Gelman, 1973) and their awareness of socially meaningful linguistic variation (Ikeda, Kobayashi, & Itakura, 2018;Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, 2017;Soley & Sebastian-Galles, 2020) suggest that they may be able to recognize the importance of social context for language use from relatively early in development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From doggy to dog: Developmental shifts in children’s use of register-specific words

Casey

Casillas²

2022

Preprint

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Child-directed language (CDL) features words such as doggy, night-night, and tummy that are rarely used in adult-directed language (ADL). Characteristics of CDL variants, such as diminutivization and reduplication, explain why they may be learned and produced earlier by children. However, it is not yet clear how or when children switch to using ADL equivalents—dog, goodnight, stomach. Through analysis of speech transcripts from CHILDES and the Language Development Project corpus, we show that children significantly increase their production of ADL variants across age, with the average CDL-to-ADL transition point at 2.5 years. Many of the linguistic features that distinguish CDL vs. ADL registers (e.g., lexical and syntactic complexity) similarly differentiated the local speech contexts surrounding CDL vs. ADL variants in children’s input. Notably, these differences emerged even in speech that was primarily child-directed. Learners may therefore be able to capitalize on these linguistic cues to support their discovery of register along with context-appropriate CDL/ADL pair use.

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“…Another consideration is that we did not control for facial or vocal differences between speakers. Indeed, speakers may differ in facial features, including ethnicity, hair color, accessories, which could have an effect on infants’ expectations of their speech (e.g., Weatherhead & White, 2018; Weatherhead et al., in press). Similarly, speakers may differ in their vocal features, including their pitch and vocal quality—two of the variables thought to be important for individual voice processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ Mapping of New Faces to New Voices

Orena

Werker

2021

Child Development

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The ability to identify individuals by voice is fundamental for communication. However, little is known about the expectations that infants hold when learning unfamiliar voices. Here, the voice-learning skills of 4-and 8month-olds (N = 53; 29 girls, 14 boys of various ethnicities) were tested using a preferential-looking task that involved audiovisual stimuli of their mothers and other unfamiliar women. Findings reveal that the expectation that novel voices map on to novel faces emerges between 4 and 8 months of age, and that infants can retain learning of face-voice pairings via nonostensive cues by 8 months of age. This study provides new insights about infants' use of disambiguation and fast mapping in early voice learning.We thank members of our research team, including S. Nijeboer and J. Cloake for their assistance in study co-ordination, K. Chen, L. Ruiz, and C. Shum for their assistance in running the study, and members of the Infant Studies Centre for the helpful discussions. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2019-0306) to Janet F. Werker, and a Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Nature et Technologies postdoctoral fellowship to Adriel John Orena.

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Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants’ Word‐Learning Assumptions

Cited by 9 publications

References 52 publications

Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?

Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?

From doggy to dog: Developmental shifts in children’s use of register-specific words

Infants’ Mapping of New Faces to New Voices

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