Learning Vocabulary

Learning Words

• Children start uttering their first words around 12 months of age
• Vocabulary increases to about 50 words over the next few months
• Word learning accelerates, leading to approximately 60,000 words by high school graduation
• This equates to learning about 10 new words per day
• Unlike memorizing math facts, children acquire words seemingly effortlessly, sometimes after hearing them only once

Vocabulary vs. Math

• Mathematics relies on vocabulary to understand the problem at hand
• Language and social context are used in human language to help derive meaning to words
• Rote memorization is needed to learn mathematical facts, but not for human language in most cases

Word Learning

• Adults memorizes vocabulary lists, translations, or associate words with pictures and videos
• Parents rarely teach like language instructors
• Rather, parents often talk about objects, events, and things not immediately present
• Child tasks involve mapping sounds onto meanings by example from the philosopher Willard Quine

Gavagai example from Philosopher Willard Quine

• An anthropologist tries characterizing the language of an unknown Indigenous tribe
• A tribesman points at a rabbit and exclaims "Gavagai!"
• The anthropologist assumes "gavagai" translates to "rabbit"
• However, "gavagai" has many possible meanings, referencing specific body parts, or even "lunch"
• All logical possibilities are not equally likely and babies rely on inferences to figure out meanings

Words and Interface to Sound

• Learning goes beyond attaching definitions to sounds
• "Duality of patterning" has language operating at two levels
  • Meaningless sounds combine into meaningful units (words)
  • Meaningful units combine to make syntactic units
• Words serve as pivot points between sound and syntactic structure
• Children must learn word meanings and interface with the sound system and syntactic structure

Sounds attached to meanings

• A baby's initial task is determining what speech "blobs" link to stable meanings
• Segmenting words and knowing word breaks is helpful, for instance with Gavagai
• Infants segment speech before their first birthday using statistical regularities
• Babies prepackage sounds into individual bundles and have them mentally stored
• Hypothetically, Gavagai breaks down to "gav agai", for example
• Artificial language experiments show babies segment using sound patterns, then know to attach meanings to gav and agai for instance
• Segmented units of speech are referred to as word units
• Babies may not understand that particular groupings of sounds are units for meaning, but rather recurring sound patterns
• Studies show babies/adults learn recurring musical groupings akin to learning word units in artificial language
• Babies are suggested to memorize meaningless sound bundles with linking sounds/meanings being new
• Linking sounds does not use stored sound sequences, but starts with new sound-based representations
• Babies segment speech with exquisite phonetic detail and use them as segmentation cues
• Sounds babies attach meanings to are less detailed that strings they segment from speech
• Mental representations from speech slicing are not same as those underlying meaningful words
• A baby has sequence for "dog", understanding recurring grouping of sounds that clump
• sound representation for a meaningful symbol differs when the baby understand dog refers to the furry pet
• Representations that serve as containers may not be strings of individual sounds, separate from the detailed representations of words sounds

Switch Task

• Switch task has sounds mapped to meanings and studies are designed to look at how these mappings are made
• Association tests like the Switch Task (Stager & Werker, 1997) test children's attention to sound details, for object-word mappings
• The task involves a habituation phase, where two objects are paired with novel words obeying phonotactic rules (lif, neem)
  • Babies watch pictures, accompanied by labels from a loudspeaker
  • Trials repeat until showing habituation signs: reduced looking time
• A test phase swaps labels/objects
  • "Switched" trials compared to "same" trials with original pairings
• Registering surprise when hearing mismatched label suggests linking label to object
• Babies ages 14+ months show longer looking times for "switch" trials, which is shortly after they speak their first words
• Effect is seen for different words like lif and neem, but not for similar sounds such as bih and dih, where they act as one
• In speech, perception tasks allows infants can differentiate consonants, but when related to visuals this is ignored
• Babie's mental representations may not contain all phonetic detail of sounds, and come from speech
• Information babies pay attention to, and commit to, long-term memory differ as a form stable lexical, where meaning is recorded\
• Babies are miserly to their long-term lexical memory
• Vocabulary increases with age where children will have to encode distinct sounds
• Infants with small vocabulary see no need for lexical representation

Reference and Concepts

• Learning goes beyond attaching definitions to sounds
• Learning requires human languages to show duality of patterning with two combination levels where sounds combine to have meaning, which then combine into syntactic units
• Words pivot from sounds and language

The role of Duality of Patterning

• Helps humans and other species understand what a situation is, as a whole
• Learning occurs because duality of patterning exists
• Those learning have an easier time understanding the sounds, or meanings of what someone is saying with words

Nouns and Objects

• For example, how does a child know rabbit refers to the whole animal?
• Intuitively tell us concepts such as a whole object are psychologically more privileged, and need to be named
• Intuitions may come from learning how languages use words to describe world
• In the context of an object, when babies hear new words, they assume the word is what's involved in an action
• Researchers propose the "whole-object bias" where word learning happens.
• Even by three months old, babies organize lines, colors, and visual world textures into objects as distinct in world stable
  • Philip Kellman and Elizabeth Spelke's study (1983), when 3-month-old babies two sticks move simultaneously, the babies think they were connecte

Naming items

• A study by George Hollich found that younger babies will pay specific attention to a single-colored object piece if it's new
• It will then be colorfully-painted, for the child to distinguish

Importance and visual attention

• Babies may have no interest in certain items whether a word has been said for it or not
• Some may visually have more impact with attention drawn, and a whole-object biases exists

What all words convey

• Knowing what're words is about and what kind of meaning they can convey allows for a set of possible meanings, for narrowing the down
• People talk about parts of an object as well as the whole thing
• Researcher John MacNamara (1972) stated that a child called the the "kitchen stove" and would warn others
• Sound object categories come from 3 year-olds, for example the hammer is a tool with a novel word

Mutual Exclusivity

• Mutual Exclusivity exists because 3 year-olds are taught to say how hammer is a tool
• To a small child, this helps recognize the word for something they don't know yet
• It can help them zoom in on what they need to know, and makes learning easier

Onomatopoeic linguists

• They found that sound can mean correspondence and go above what words can convey
• Sounds can imitate a specific noise, with a form of sound imitation that goes above texture, size or motion
• A spoken language study lead by Daphne Maurer (2006), showed pairs with sharp objects and others with blobby, rounded properties
• Toddlers had to pick what was the kejk or the buba
• Their responses were not random, as 70% picked what matched the sound

Language evolution and words

• Male versus female names, or nouns versus verbs are language-sepcific to increase with amplified time
• Signs have iconicity
• Caselli et atl noted ASL around 2/3rds shown level of transparency with its meaning (2017)

Non-Arbitrariness some sources

• Sounds have numerous ways of incorporating non-arbitrary elements, which enhance communicable meaning
• Onomatopoeic words uses language sounds to imitate naturally occurring sounds, often differing across lanaguages
• Persian for knowing: "taqtaq"
• Ideophones are used in specific classes on conveying sensory impressions -Japanese: goo/gorogoro: "one multiple heavy

Signed languages/iconicity

• Given what is signed and its shot through with iconicity, children learn to sign
• Study lead by Robbin Thompson of young learners, from BSL
• Iconic signs heavily weighted than non-iconic
• Test showed ability for children to learn icon vs non icoic signs and looked at what would help these individuals

Different ways to learn

• 4 Year old hearing children, iconicity was better at remembering and matching signs to what was said for it
• Deaf children boosted by learnings and expectations increased

Categories are big and small, and in line with specific details

• Terms such as, "rabbit" or, "blanket" can be thought of as what a child can feel - Only some can be deemed as proper nouns such as the location Cleveland
  • Without generalizing referents, words would narrow and seem too specific
  • Human Language has the ability to convey many useful situations

The amount of categories

• Mapping words makes it much simpler to understand category by referencing
• For Example - one hears,"foods that give heartburn," they understand the categories
• The are many categories for reference, which seem to be most natural
  • Mid-level Degree Specificity" - when kids mention, " chairs,", most understand, its in general terms
  • These Midlevel categories called, "basic-level"
  • Compared to general - "superordinate-level-"
  • More specific - "subordinate-level"
• Superordinate-level are more general, basic comes with familiarity
• If that "it is a dog", a big deal can be said and the amount of info goes
• Terms are also distinct from one another unlike, " basic.v"
• Language Users often express what something is before someone goes into other categories