types of word learning studies
- looking while listening/pointing (comprehension)
- recording how children talk in naturalistic settings, asking them to name things (production)
teaching children new words in lab
- what can they learn?
- how do they learn?
“point and name” learning
- usually only nouns
- point and name is not common and not universal
the mapping problem
- example of foreign word “gavagai”
- when something is labelled it could apply to multiple aspects
- under extension
- over extension
Quine, 1960
comprehension in infants
- appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 months
- infants start to comprehend verbs later - 10 months
- 2 year olds comprehend 2-3x as many words as they produce
comprehension precedes production
looking while listening task
- 2 options, “look at hand” “… apple”
- between 18 and 24 months they get much faster (Fernald)
- by 18 months they don’t even need the full word
(Fernald, Swingley, & Pinto, 2001)
early noun bias
cross-linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocabularies
e.g., 40% of English speaking childrens first 50 words - Nelson
more nouns even in “verb friendlier” languages
natural partitions hypothesis
early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings
actions, states etc. tend to apply to entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space & time
Gentner, 1982
socially mediated word learning
- not all early words are nouns (hello)
- not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast)
- learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult’s intentions, irrespective of word class
- happend often with nouns
Tomasello, 2003
Variety of early word production
Variety of situations
- names for people and objects
- names for actions
- names for properties
Tomasello, 1992
under-extension
word used only in specific context or specific exemplar
words used in specific contexts where adults would use in a wide range of contexts
- ‘bye’ only when putting the telephone receiver down
- ‘there’ only when putting an object in a location
- refer to the word flower to only mean a rose and not other flowers
Overextension
word used beyond its true meaning
overextension errors are frequent
- e.g., calling a ball an apple
- make erorrs until ~ 2.5 years
- category error
- vocabulary limitations
(Rescorla, 1980)
Object constraint - ‘innate’ constraint
- words refer to objects
- explains early noun bias
Gentner, 1982
whole-object - ‘innate’ constraint
- words refer to whole object rather than their parts
- “gavagai” = whole animal
Markman, 1991
principle of contrast - ‘innate’ constraint
- no words have exactly the same meaning
- explains how the child overcomes overextension
Clark, 1995
Mutual exclusivity - ‘innate constraint’
- no object has more than one name
- helps children override the ‘whole object constraint’ and learn the names for parts of objects
Markman, 1988
Are constraints specific to language?
example
- my uncle gave me this (show object)
- give me the one my dog likes to play with (from array)
- 3 year olds select new object, social inferencing on intention unrelated to meaning of words
Diesendruck & Markson, 2001
syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis
- based on the idea that there are innate links between syntactic and semantic categories
- learners can make inferences about semantics from their observations on synactic category
Gleitman, 1990
structural cues - kneading task
3-5 year olds shown picture of someone kneading a substance in a bowl
- do you know what is means to sib? (other questions about ‘sib’)
task: pick sibling, a sib, or sib from a selection of pictures depicting several actions, substances, and containers
- sibbing = picture of kneading
- a sib = picture of bowl
- sib = picture of substance
Brown, 1957
structural cues - fep task
4 year olds pick different object of same kind when asked to find the fep one, but a different abject when asked to find the fep
Gelman & Markman, 1985
structural cues study: how infants extend novel nouns and adjectives
14 month olds
with nouns children extended the noun to the category but not the property
- noun/adj - new term (syntactic), , property - colour, category - animal
with adjectives children do not extent to the category or property
Waxman and Booth, 2001
the social-pragmatic approach
- children learn words and word meaning from pragmatic cues in the environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning
- word learning is constrained in 2 main ways:
- the social world is structured: routines, games, patterned social interaction
- social cognitive skills the infant has: joint attention, intention reading
Tomasello, 2003
Social pragmatic approach: routines
Children learn language in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines
- young children learn almost all their early language in cultural routines
- cross culturally children are engaged in a wide range of social routines and learn most of their early words in familiar contexts
the social-pragmatic approach: social cognitive skills
- during joint revolution adults use language and children attempt to interpret the communicative intent
- world learning occurs when children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utterance
- the shared common groupd reduces the possible referents
the social pragmatic approach: intentional reading
- children use speaker’s intentions to infer meaning
- child already knows name of familiar object on table & knows the adult knows. So can assume that the adult intends the novel object when the adult asks …. (Baldwin)
- 2 year olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult looking for rather than objects they have rejected
