Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning

Bannard, Colin; Matthews, David

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02075.x

Cited by 359 publications

(169 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This finding is in line with previous studies in the field of language production that have examined the impact of phrase frequency on measures of phonological reduction [26], and agrees with findings from the field of language comprehension [17,[20][21][22][23][24][25]. For example, as discussed in the Introduction, Arnon and Snider [17] found that recognition times of multi-word phrases were sensitive to the frequency with which the phrases appeared in the language.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…In addition, a study by Sosa and MacFarlane [21] revealed that the speed with which listeners were able to detect the word 'of' was determined by the frequency of the phrase in which the word appeared. Finally, Bannard and Matthews [22] have shown that two and three-year old infants are better at repeating and producing high (e.g., 'sit in your chair') versus low (e.g., 'sit in your truck') frequency phrases (see [23][24][25] for additional results). Thus, there now exists a substantial body of evidence that suggest that phrase frequency affects the processing of multi-word phrases in a language comprehension context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phrase frequency effects in language production

Janssen¹,

Barber²

2011

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrase frequency effects in language production

Janssen¹,

Barber²

2011

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…Comparable evidence also exists in the child processing literature. Bannard and Matthews (2008) found that young children processed frequent phrases (a drink of milk) faster than infrequent ones (a drink of tea). This lead them to conclude that children have experience-derived knowledge of four-word utterances, the most frequent of which are stored in their lexicon.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing a phrase “time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences.

Siyanova‐Chanturia¹,

Conklin²,

Heuven³

2011

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

204

272

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Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases (bride and groom) and their reversed forms (groom and bride), which are identical in syntax and meaning but that differ in phrasal frequency. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that native speakers and nonnative speakers, across a range of proficiencies, are sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in English. Results also indicate that native speakers and higher proficiency nonnatives are sensitive to whether a phrase occurs in a particular configuration (binomial vs. reversed) in English, highlighting the contribution of entrenchment of a particular phrase in memory.

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“…If the child did so, we also considered whether they used the same one as the experimenter or another form (e.g., 'muddy shoes' instead of 'dirty shoes'). Using the same adjective should be easier if it is frequent given the noun (Bannard & Matthews, 2008) and this should act as a counter pressure in production.…”

Section: Information Content and Ease Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production

2017

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Of all the things we could say, what determines what is worth saying? Greenfield's principle of informativeness states that, right from the onset of language, humans selectively comment on whatever they find unexpected. We quantify this tendency using information theoretic measures, and test the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that are low frequency given the context because these will be most informative. Using corpora of child directed speech, we identified adjectives that varied in how informative (i.e., unexpected) they were given the noun they modified. Three-year-olds (N=31, replication N=13) heard an experimenter use these adjectives to describe pictures. The children's task was then to describe the pictures to another person. As the information content of the experimenter's adjective increased, so did children's tendency to comment on the feature that adjective had encoded. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that children balance this informativeness with a competing drive to ease production.Keywords: Information theory, pragmatics, child language, language production. Greenfield's principle of informativeness (Greenfield, 1979;Greenfield & Smith, 1976), proposes that, right from the onset of language, infants choose to comment on things they find unexpected or uncertain and leave unmentioned whatever is constant or can be assumed. Greenfield suggested that this behaviour might be captured by the concept of information provided by the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). In this case, a message provides information to the extent that it is unpredictable given what is already known. However, this early sketch of how to quantify informativeness was abandoned following a critique by Pea (1979). In this study, we demonstrate that an information theoretic approach is viable. WHAT S WORTH TALKING ABOUTMoreover, adopting it brings to light a trade-off between informativeness (which requires using unlikely forms) and ease of production (which favours using likelyi.e., frequent -forms). We show that, even from 3 years of age, while children find it easier to produce frequent forms, they nonetheless make the effort to talk about the unexpected. WHAT S WORTH TALKING ABOUT 4Greenfield's Principle of Informativeness Greenfield & Smith (1976) analysed naturalistic recordings of children at the one-word stage and observed cases where a child had the choice of saying one of two words to talk about an event (e.g., the words skate and on to talk about putting skates on). They explained why one or other word was said at any given moment using the concept of uncertainty. For example, if the object was out of the child's possession, then it became uncertain and the word referring to it (skate) was likely to be produced.If the child had the object, it became certain and they would express something else, such as a desired change of state (on). On the basis of these observations, Greenfield and Smith argued for 'certainty-uncertainty as the perceptual-cognitive basis for the...

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Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning

Cited by 359 publications

References 35 publications

Phrase frequency effects in language production

Phrase frequency effects in language production

Seeing a phrase “time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences.

What’s Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production

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