Supporting Early Vocabulary Development: What Sort of Responsiveness Matters?

McGillion, Michelle; Herbert, John; Pine, Julián M.; Keren‐Portnoy, Tamar; Vihman, Marilyn May; Matthews, David

doi:10.1109/tamd.2013.2275949

Cited by 74 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Of course, infants do not learn words and referents they have not experienced. Furthermore, parents' "focusing in" on infants' attention likely provides higher-quality learning instances (35). Our results also suggest an expansion of Bergelson and Swingley (36), who found that common nouns are more referentially transparent than common nonnouns.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

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Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Bergelson

Aslin

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

137

177

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Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-moolds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253-3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-moolds for a hallmark of the mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine whether properties of the home environment that have been linked with lexical knowledge in older children are detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home measures from the same infants. We find evidence for cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns, infants looked significantly more at named target images when the competitor images were semantically unrelated (e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g., milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun "copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon from the outset.word learning | lexicon | cognitive development | language acquisition | environmental effects T o learn words, infants integrate their linguistic experienceswith word forms and the conceptual categories to which they refer. They do this fast: A growing literature demonstrates that, by around 6 mo, infants have begun understanding nouns (1-5), suggesting they form word-referent links from their environment in the first half-year.The speech-sound learning trajectory in year one is relatively well-established (6): Infants' language-specific sensitivity emerges around 6 mo for vowels, and 12 mo for consonants (7,8). Indeed, by 12 mo, infants reveal robust phonetic representations for common words (9-11), and fine-grained knowledge of native language speech-sound combinatorics (12). Before this, their sensitivity to phonemic and talker-specific differences can be fragile (3,13).In contrast, early meaning is understudied: It's not clear what makes the first words infants understand learnable, or what aspects of meaning infants initially represent. This is partly because meaning components are not straightforward. While phonetic features (e.g., voicing) let us readily quantify speechsound differences, characterizing meaning is harder; consider describing or comparing how "dog" and "log" sound versus what they mean. While toddlers are sensitive to visual similarity, shape, and semantic category (14-17), little is known about nascent semantic representations.Regarding early semantics, Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (18) find that both visual similarity and category membership contribute to semantic competition: For toddlers, understanding "shoe" in the context of a boot and a shoe was harder than when shoe appeared with a hat or bin instead. Thus, even in seasoned word learners, certa...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…Finally, we examined referential transparency (i.e., whether parents talk about observable referents), which is suggested to facilitate language learning (33)(34)(35). Notably, previous research examining why infants learn common nonnouns (e.g., "hi," "eat") later than common nouns found that visual copresence varied across word class (36).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Bergelson

Aslin

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

137

177

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“…Studies have provided evidence that caregivers' contingent interactions (e.g., those that follow on the infant's focus of attention) tend to elicit more pointing and speech combinations by infants (e.g., Miller & GrosLouis, 2013;Miller & Lossia, 2013) and also lead to better language abilities later in development (McGillion et al, 2013;Rollins, 2003;Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001;Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). These results provide indirect evidence about the potential relationship between an infant's multimodal communicative ability to initiate joint attention (i.e., to communicate and influence an adult's attention regarding an intended referent) on the one hand and the infant's later language abilities on the other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language development at 18 months is related to multimodal communicative strategies at 12 months

Igualada

Bosch

Prieto

2015

Infant Behavior and Development

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The present study investigated the degree to which an infants' use of simultaneous gesture-speech combinations during controlled social interactions predicts later language development. Nineteen infants participated in a declarative pointing task involving three different social conditions: two experimental conditions (a) available, when the adult was visually attending to the infant but did not attend to the object of reference jointly with the child, and (b) unavailable, when the adult was not visually attending to neither the infant nor the object; and (c) a baseline condition, when the adult jointly engaged with the infant's object of reference. At 12 months of age measures related to infants' speech-only productions, pointing-only gestures, and simultaneous pointing-speech combinations were obtained in each of the three social conditions. Each child's lexical and grammatical output was assessed at 18 months of age through parental report. Results revealed a significant interaction between social condition and type of communicative production. Specifically, only simultaneous pointing-speech combinations increased in frequency during the available condition compared to baseline, while no differences were found for speech-only and pointing-only productions. Moreover, simultaneous pointing-speech combinations in the available condition at 12 months positively correlated with lexical and grammatical development at 18 months of age. The ability to selectively use this multimodal communicative strategy to engage the adult in joint attention by drawing his attention toward an unseen event or object reveals 12-month-olds' clear understanding of referential cues that are relevant for language development. This strategy to successfully initiate and maintain joint attention is related to language development as it increases learning opportunities from social interactions.

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“…For example, would existing neural network models of learning to produce speech sounds via reinforcement, such as [35] or [36], if given realistic numbers of trials and adult reinforcement rates, also yield good fits to human data? Relatedly, future extensions of this work both on the human side and on the modeling side should take into account more detailed information about the acoustics and semantics [38] of child and adult vocalizations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An iterative probabilistic model of speech-related vocalization rate growth due to child-caregiver interaction

Warlaumont

2014

4th International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics

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Over the course of the first four years of life, the proportion of children's vocalizations that are speech-related increases steadily. The rate of this growth is reduced for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and for children from households with relatively lower socioeconomic status (SES). The present study attempts to model this set of findings, treating adult responses as reinforcers of child behavior. The model starts with a 50% chance of producing a speech-related vocalization and gradually increases this probability by updating its speechrelated vocalization and not-speech-related vocalization probabilities each time a response is received. Numbers of vocalizations per day and rates of adult responding to the two vocalization types are drawn from human data to create high SES typically developing (TD), high SES ASD, low SES TD, and low SES ASD versions. The model shows growth in speech-related vocalizations that matches well to that observed for the human children and that matches the differences observed across clinical and SES groups. Some aspects of speech-related vocalization development are not well accounted for by the model; possible explanations and extensions are proposed.

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Supporting Early Vocabulary Development: What Sort of Responsiveness Matters?

Cited by 74 publications

References 39 publications

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds

Language development at 18 months is related to multimodal communicative strategies at 12 months

An iterative probabilistic model of speech-related vocalization rate growth due to child-caregiver interaction

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