Lexical Development: LING/PSYC 370B Lecture Notes PDF

Lexical development LING/PSYC 370B February 10th & 13th Gabrielle Manning Announcements Midterm is February 24th (after reading week) 2 Roadmap The mental lexicon Early lexical development Lexical processes Grammatical gender...

Lexical development LING/PSYC 370B February 10th & 13th Gabrielle Manning Announcements Midterm is February 24th (after reading week) 2 Roadmap The mental lexicon Early lexical development Lexical processes Grammatical gender 3 The mental lexicon 4 What’s a word? The word (linguistic sign) is a two-sided entity formed by an arbitrary sound-meaning pair The signifier (sound form) The signified (meaning/reference) Reference: what a word stands for E.g., ”apple” refers to 5 One word, two words, or more? realize, realization run, runs, ran play, plays, playing, player Do we store these as individual words or as decomposed morphological units? Storing as different words isn’t cognitively economical considering language is productive! 6 The mental lexicon Words or morphemes are considered as an “entry” in the mental lexicon (mental dictionary) Each representation has properties associated with it: Semantic, phonological, syntactic, morphological lexical storage Spelling and pronunciation Relationship to other words Other related information Etc… lexical access 7  Storage hypotheses Some words are stored whole, others are decomposed Argument for: irregular forms (e.g., ran) Full-listing Dual-route/hybrid Decomposition hypothesis hypothesis hypothesis All word forms are individually stored in the Morphological components are stored and lexicon assembled as needed Arguments for: easy access of irregular forms, Arguments for: productivity, morphologically whole-word retention in aphasic patients rich languages, priming data Arguments against: cognitively taxing, language Argument against: irregular forms (e.g., ran) productivity 8 Lexical organization How do we organize representations in our mental lexicon? Alphabetically? 9  Lexical pike organization on No organization? dog frog Phonological sleek similarity? black cat Semantic look similarity? to in Age of acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 10  Lexical in organization on No organization? dog look black Phonological frog sleek similarity? Semantic pike similarity? to Age of cat acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 11  on Lexical in organization No organization? dog look Phonological frog sleek similarity? pike Semantic cat similarity? to black Age of acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 12  look Lexical to on organization No organization? dog pike Phonological frog in similarity? Semantic cat similarity? sleek black Age of acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 13  in Lexical to on organization No organization? dog look Phonological frog similarity? pike sleek Semantic cat similarity? black Age of acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 14  in Lexical to on organization No organization? dog sleek Phonological similarity? look pike cat Semantic black similarity? Age of frog acquisition? Parts of speech? Frequency of use? 15 Early lexical development 16 First words First words may be context bound Could be due to: Limited experience Frequency of primary caregiver use Prelexical words: context bound words are not yet lexicalized No referential value until children's cognitive capacities increase 17 First words Evidence from language diaries Context bound words may not be contextually flexible for other children E.g., no = refusal for Jacqui but contextually flexible for Jenny 18 Vocabulary – first 50 words Between 15-24 months Expressive vs. referential children Expressive: vocabulary consists of many social words E.g., hi, bye Referential: vocabulary consists of many referential words E.g., doggy, kitty, spoon All grammatical categories are present in the first 50 words Natural partitions and relational relativity hypotheses: physical objects aid in noun association 19  French ~30 words English Bilingual first words maison ~20 words papa teddy chien ball First 50 words are split across both languages Reflective of input from both languages 30% French exposure 20% English exposure 20 Vocabulary spurt 8-11 22-37 words per month Validly has been questioned Why is the spurt present in some children? Ongoing cognitive development Greater understanding of categories Increased efficiency More available words 21  Word categories When learning words, children need to know how to map those words onto the correct category Basic-level categories: mid-level category of words, balance between similarity and differences dog apple Superordinate-level categories: more general – wide animal fruit range of referents Subordinate-level categories: more specific – smaller dalmatian gala range of referents 22 Word categories Over-extension: mapping new words onto categories that are too general Under-extension: mapping new words onto categories that too narrow ??? Dog! 23 Word categories Children don’t always match new words to the correct categories when they are first exposed to them zav zav zav 24 Forming word categories 1-year-olds can categorize Familiarization Test words More interested in the new object that was not part of the category ”look at the tomoa!” 25 Waxman et al. (1995) Individual differences in word acquisition Environmental Child-specific Total amount of speech heard Sociability Longer sentences Verbal processing and working memory Joint attention Phonological memory 26 Short-term memory Short term memory: part of our memory that stores limited amounts of information for a limited amount of time Can only hold about 7±2 units of information 839-939-3949 “Chunking” information is useful 27  Maintenance/rehearsal Working memory Working memory: allows us to mentally work Working with the information held in short-term memory memory Maintenance: holding information in short-term memory Short-term & working Manipulation: working on that information memory 28  PROCESSING… Lexical processes 29 Speech segmentation Speech segmentation problem: children need to figure out where words are in continuous streams of speech with no reliable pauses 30  Solutions to the speech segmentation problem Phonotactics Stress CDS Word boundaries can be Slower speech Certain sounds provide indicated by stress in a clues for the beginning or and increased language end of words based on emphasis Trochaic stress: phonotactics emphasis on the first syllable Iambic stress: when the first syllable is unstressed gauč BLACKmail reTURN 31 Word learning GAVAGAI! What is it? Rabbit Grey Standing Rabbit foot Rabbit ear Etc. Why do we assume “rabbit”? 32 Fast mapping Fast mapping: making a quick association between a novel word and the most likely meaning associated with the word plant 33 Mutual exclusivity Mutual exclusivity: the tendency to assign one label/name to an object The most common label is often used 34 Whole object bias Whole object bias: the assumption that a new word heard in the context of a salient object refers to the object as a whole and not its parts/other characteristics 12–19-month-olds show evidence of this bias Longer looks to the intact object Equal looking at the separate parts and the whole object 35 Hollich et al. (2007) Whole object bias The whole object bias may be useful when learning new words as a child, but it’s not necessarily a sustainable method Don’t touch that, it’s hot! “hot” 36 Word properties Syntactic bootstrapping: using syntactic properties of words to narrow in and identify the meaning that a word is likely to convey Longer looking times at the video with the duck “gorping” the bunny 37 (Naigles, 1990) Cross-situational statistics Use of information from multiple situations Seen as young as 12 months-old Children learn associations between labels and referents based on co-occurrence 38 Smith & Yu (2018) Complex words and rules Children can tag the correct plural marking based on exposure to similar nouns (e.g., dogs, birds) Rule formation - Noun + s Irregular forms are argued to be memorized (e.g., mice, children, deer) ran runned 39 Grammatical gender 40 Ggrammatical gender the the ball la poussette cat she *the walked *le poussette 6 months 18 months 25 months Grammatical gender Grammatical gender: arbitrary noun classification system la casaF le châteauM crkvaM Determiner-noun pairs have a high level of co-occurrence 42 Grammatical gender & co-occurrence patterns Can children use and store sub categorical gender information earlier than 2? la pousette 24 monolingual French toddlers – 18 months le pousette laF poussetteF leM poussetteF 43 Van Heugten & Christophe (2015) Midterm information Date: Monday, February 24th Time/length: During class; 90 minutes Where: Brightspace Content: Weeks 1 -6 Format: Multiple choice, true/false, short answer/critical thinking Open book/notes Class Zoom room open for questions 44