Word Learning Lecture 3 - Developmental Psychology

Word Learning Lecture 3 21021: Topics in Developmental Psychology Dr. Alissa Ferry Image: Jaro, Josef Čapek (1939) Lecture Aims: To outline the mapping problem and why learning words is hard To provide a description of children’s early words (comprehension and p...

Word Learning Lecture 3 21021: Topics in Developmental Psychology Dr. Alissa Ferry Image: Jaro, Josef Čapek (1939) Lecture Aims: To outline the mapping problem and why learning words is hard To provide a description of children’s early words (comprehension and production) To evaluate different theoretical accounts of early word learning. Lecture Outline Why learning words is hard. Pointing and naming issues The mapping problem Early words: what do children know about their language. Comprehension Production Early words: how children learn. Teaching words in the lab Some possible mechanisms to word learning Innate Constraints Structural Cues in Language The Social-Pragmatic Approach Word Learning is HARD (1) It can’t just be “point and name” Point and name is not common (and not universal) When pointing and naming, usually only nouns  e Ms does Word -what Learning - is HARD (2) The mapping - problem (Quine, could be 1960) of any these words. Word Getting meaning right Learning is Under-extension HARD (3) more Than dog , dogs be car just y ~ Word Learning is HARD (4) Getting meaning right: - Over-extension dogscould lins , horses etc.  Lecture Outline (2) Why learning words is hard. Pointing and naming issues The mapping problem Early words: what do children know about their language. Comprehension Production Early words: how children learn. Teaching words in the lab Some possible mechanisms to word learning Innate Constraints Structural Cues in Language The Social-Pragmatic Approach  Comprehension precedes production Early Word 2-year-olds comprehend 2-3x as - Knowledge: many words as they produce Comprehension (1) (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1976) Infants appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 nouns= 6 months months (Bergelson & Swingley, verbs = 10 months 2012) bea comes Infants start to comprehend verbs comprehension - (e.g., eat, hug) later ~ 10 months (Bergelson & Swingley, 2013) Early Word Knowledge: Comprehension (2) Between 18- and 24-months, infants get much - faster on the looking-while-listening task (Fernald et al., 1998). 6 months old takes time to look at an apple ar hand. However , 18-24 months its. faster By 18 months, they don’t even need the full word had (Fernald, Swingley, & Pinto, 2001) They'll know before the word is said. full Early Word Knowledge: Production (1) Around 12 months, first words, by 24-30mths around 500 - - words nowns verbs action , , words, (however, lots of variability) adjectives First words from a range of categories Nouns (objects – dog, cat & proper names - Mummy) [ Verbs (action words – jump, get) Social routines (bye, hello, please) Adjectives (descriptions – cold, dirty) Lack of things like articles (a, the) -  Early Word Knowledge: Production (2) ds typ Early Noun Bias ↳ easilycurred Cross-linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocabularies (e.g., 40% of English-speaking children’s first 50 words – Nelson, 1973) More nouns even in "verb-friendly" languages Natural partitions hypothesis (Gentner, 1982) Early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings. -object Actions, states etc. tend to apply TO entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space & time. actions , states relate to the objects (nouns) Early Word Knowledge: Production (3) Early Noun Bias Socially mediated word learning (Tomasello, 2003) Not all early words are nouns (hello, bye) Not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast) Learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult’s intentions, irrespective of word class. Happens often with nouns Early Word Knowledge: Production (4) Words used in a variety of situations (Tomasello, 1992) Names for people and objects – e.g. Daddy, spoon Names for actions – e.g. open to request that a door be opened, a jar be opened etc. Names for properties - gone, more, dirty Early Word Knowledge: Production Errors (1) 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 (Bates et al, 1979) there only when putting an object in a location (Barrett, 1982) Refer to the word flower only to mean a rose and NOT other flowers (Fernandez & Cairns, 2011) Early Word Knowledge: Production Errors (2) Early Word Knowledge: Production Errors (3) Overextension: word used beyond its true meaning Overextension errors are frequent (Rescorla, 1980) E.g., Calling a ball an apple Generally, make errors until ~ 2.5 years - Category error (the concept of ball is incorrectly in the same category as apple) Vocabulary limitations (lack the word “ball”) Lecture Outline (3) Why learning words is hard. Pointing and naming issues The mapping problem Early words: what do children know about their language. Comprehension Production Early words: how children learn. Teaching words in the lab Some possible mechanisms to word learning Innate Constraints Structural Cues in Language The Social-Pragmatic Approach Can you find the toma? Innate constraints on early word learning (1) Gavagai - how do children know what a word refers to? 1. Object constraint (Gentner, 1982) Words refer to objects Explains early noun bias 2. Whole-object constraint (Markman, 1991) Words refer to whole objects rather than their parts. Gavagai = whole animal, not tail, ears, legs  Innate constraints on early word learning (2) 3. Principle of contrast (Clark, 1995) No two words have exactly the same meaning Explains how the child overcomes overextension 4. Mutual exclusivity (Markman, 1988) - each objecthasonlyare No object has more than one name Helps children override the ‘whole- object constraint’ and learn the names for parts of objects. Mutual Exclusivity (an example): https://youtu.be/FAEE2UULdq0  Problems with constraints theories 1. Do constraints explain word learning or just describe it? Non-noun words? 2. Are constraints innate or learned via experience? - Little research on infants. 3. Are constraints specific to language? (Diesendruck & Markson, 2001) My uncle gave me this (show object). Give me the one my dog likes to play with (from array). 3-yr-olds select new object, social inferencing on intention unrelated to meaning of words.  mesture grammaticanature Structural - Syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Gleitman, hand as to cues to 1990) Gives you what the a helping word means. 3-5-yr-olds shown picture of someone kneading word a substance in a bowl (Brown, 1957): do you know what it means to sib? meaning do you know what a sib is? have you seen any sib? (1) Task – pick sibbing, a sib, or sib from selection of pictures depicting several actions, substances, and containers. sibbing = picture of kneading a sib = picture of bowl sib = picture of substance  Structural cues to word meaning (2) Nouns refer to objects/categories and adjectives refer to properties. Nouns= object Adjectives = properties. Nouns and adjectives differ in how they are used in sentences. “Can you hand me the X?” = noun “Can you hand me the X one?” = adjective “Can you hand me the red X?” = noun “Can you hand me the X pen?” = adjective where a word appears in a sentence matters.  usuall his Structural cues to word meaning (3) mee ↑ a Gelman & Markman (1985) 4-yr-olds pick different object of same kind when asked to find the fep ( one, but a different usually pick this object when asked for 'find the fep' to find the fep  Structural cues to word meaning (4) Waxman and Booth (2001) looked at how 14-month-- - olds extend novel nouns and adjectives. With nouns, children extend the noun to the category but not the property. Children see objects (e.g., purple elephant, purple dog, purple bear, purple lion). Children are told "Look! These are blickets! This one is a blicket and this one is a blicket." When shown a purple horse and a purple plate and asked shows that they to give a blicket, they give the horse this - refer to blicket as a noun When shown a purple horse and a blue horse and asked and to give a blicket, they give-randomly base it on category. either of the two of animals. Structural cues to word meaning (5) are categcries pure allmals eleenets 7 [ aus - bed usealoa n & Caes Spurple horse because it is in the animal category  Structural cues to word meaning (6) Waxman and Booth (2001) looked at how 14-month- olds extend novel nouns and adjectives. With adjectives, children do not extend to the category OR the property. Children see objects (e.g., purple elephant, purple dog, purple bear, purple lion). Children are told "Look! These are blickish! This one is blickish and this one is blickish." When shown a purple horse and a purple plate and asked to give the blickish one, they give randomly When shown a purple horse and a blue horse and asked to give the blickish one, they give randomly Children DON’T extend it to the category, but also don’t extend it to the property. They seem to understand that it is not a noun, but don’t quite get what it actually does Structural cues to word meaning (7) to the color. The adjective refers is & category colour. considered - J [ random because random because is same category both are purple even though eventouais color is different. not the same Structural cues to word meaning (8) Structural cues to nouns seemed to be learned early, but structural cues to other words appear later. nowns= learned early Adjectives 18-month-olds show the same pattern (Booth & Waxman, 2009) 21-month-olds are getting better but not great (Waxman and Markow, 1998).  Structural cues to word meaning: Verbs This can be used to narrow down verb meanings. Two-year-olds use structural cues to narrow down verb meanings (Naigles, 1990) A man is running with a dog right behind him: behind running The dog is meeking the man. away The man is meeking- the dog. running > from , The man is meeking. freeing 4 What does meeking mean? scared word & structure gives meaning  Structural Cues to Word Meaning: Issues Children sensitive to some aspects of sentence structure, but not clear exactly what and when. The chicken and the egg…Some knowledge of words and word categories is needed to understand their structure. Do experimental studies reveal something about long term learning of word meaning, or immediate problem- solving task? Structural information can’t solve all the problems - > Walking The man’s tamming over the bridge , Strolling. Tamming = walking, strolling, going structure tells you about the type of meaning butratifies.  The social-pragmatic approach Proposed by Tomasello (2003) Children learn words and word meaning from m pragmatic cues in the environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning. Word learning is constrained in two main ways: 1. The social world is structured: Routines, games, patterned social interactions 2. Social-cognitive skills the infant has: joint attention, intention reading.  The social-pragmatic approach: Scaffolding and routines Children learn language in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines. Young children learn almost all their early language in cultural routines, e.g., feeding, games, book reading (Ratner & Bruner, 1978) Cross-culturally, children are engaged in a wide range of social routines and learn most of their early words in familiar contexts (Lieven, 1994). routines play an important in role learninglanguage The social-pragmatic approach: Social-cognitive skills Social revolution at approximately 9 months. During joint attention, adults use language and children attempt to interpret the communicative intent. Word learning occurs when children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utterance. The shared common ground reduces the possible referents (Baldwin, 1993). The social-pragmatic approach: Social- cognitive skills (2) Children use things like eye-gaze and joint attention to identify referents from adults. 18- to 20-month-olds learn names for objects better when the speaker and infant are jointly attending to the object (Baldwin et al., 1996) to better learning. sharing attention leads word Gaze-following behaviour at 10 months predicts language skills at 18 months (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005) Eye Gaze Direction: An example https://youtu.be/xY7TatEeC2s  The social-pragmatic approach: Intention Reading (1) Children use speaker’s intentions to infer meaning (Baldwin, 1991, though see Jaswal & Hansen, 2006) Child already knows the name of the familiar object on the table & she knows the adult knows this too. So she can assume (using intention-reading) that the adult intends the novel object when the adults asks her to “show me the modi.” 2-year-olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult - looking for rather than objects they have rejected (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). Children use to associate word with can emotional cues a an object. The social-pragmatic approach: Intention Reading (2) Acquisition of verbs – children able to interpret adult’s anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action (Tomasello & Kruger, 1992) Children can differentiate between intended and accidental actions when learning new verbs (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). The social-pragmatic approach: Issues What kinds of inferential skills does the child bring to the task of language acquisition? Can this process of learning account for the acquisition of complex syntax? Word Learning Summary Language learning is not isolated Cognitive, social, environmental factors Children show key patterns in how they use language Comprehension precedes production Early noun bias Children have access to a variety of sources of information when learning word meanings. Different theories to try to explain how children learn word meanings. Critical Evaluations Unclear when different information is used at different stages of development. Would we expect the same strategies across languages and cultures? How do children learn less salient words (e.g., the) or words that are more abstract (e.g., happiness, justice)?  Thank you! You've finished Alissa's content!  References (1) Baldwin, D. A. (1991). Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference. Child Development, 62(5), 874-890. Baldwin, D. A. (1993). Early referential understanding: Infants' ability to recognize referential acts for what they are. Developmental Psychology, 29(5), 832. Barrett, M. D. (1982). Distinguishing between prototypes: The early acquisition of the meaning of object names. Language Development, 1, 313-334. Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols. Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(9), 3253-3258. Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2013). The acquisition of abstract words by young infants. Cognition, 127(3), 391-397. Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2017). Young infants’ word comprehension given an unfamiliar talker or altered pronunciations. Child Development. Booth, A. E., & Waxman, S. R. (2009). A horse of a different color: Specifying with precision infants’ mappings of novel nouns and adjectives. Child Development, 80(1), 15-22. Braginsky, M., Yurovsky, D., Marchman, V. A., & Frank, M. C. (2019). Consistency and variability in children’s word learning across languages. Open Mind, 3, 52-67. Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2005). The development of gaze following and its relation to language. Developmental science, 8(6), 535-543. Brown, R. W. (1957). Linguistic determinism and the part of speech. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55(1), 1.  References (2) Clark, E. V. (1995). The lexicon in acquisition (Vol. 65). Cambridge University Press. Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2001). Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account. Developmental Psychology, 37(5), 630. Fernald, A., Pinto, J. P., Swingley, D., Weinbergy, A., & McRoberts, G. W. (1998). Rapid gains in speed of verbal processing by infants in the 2nd year. Psychological Science, 9(3), 228-231. Fernald, A., Swingley, D., & Pinto, J. P. (2001). When half a word is enough: Infants can recognize spoken words using partial phonetic information. Child Development, 72(4), 1003-1015. Fernández, E. M., & Cairns, H. S. (2010). Fundamentals of psycholinguistics. John Wiley & Sons. Gelman, S. A., & Markman, E. M. (1985). Implicit contrast in adjectives vs. nouns: Implications for word-learning in preschoolers. Journal of Child language, 12(1), 125-143. Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. Center for the Study of Reading Technical Report; no. 257. Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (2001). "The Course of Children's Naming Errors in Early Word Learning". Journal of Cognition and Development. 2 (2): 131–155. Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1(1), 3-55. Jaswal, V. K., & Hansen, M. B. (2006). Learning words: Children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity. Developmental Science, 9(2), 158-165. Lieven, E. V. (1994). Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language addressed to children. Markman, E. M. (1991). Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. Mit Press. Markman, E. M., & Wachtel, G. F. (1988). Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive psychology, 20(2), 121-157.  References (3) Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 17(2), 357-374. Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the society for research in child development, 1-135. Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Translation and meaning. Word and object, 26-79. Goldin-Meadow, S., Seligman, M. E., & Gelman, R. (1976). Language in the two-year old. Cognition, 4(2), 189- 202. Ratner, N., & Bruner, J. (1978). Games, social exchange and the acquisition of language. Journal of Child Language, 5(3), 391-401. Rescorla, L. A. (1980). Overextension in early language development. Journal of child language, 7(2), 321-335. Soja, N. N., Carey, S., & Spelke, E. S. (1991). Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms. Cognition, 38(2), 179-211. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based approach to child language acquisition. Cambridge (MA). Tomasello, M. (1992). The social bases of language acquisition. Social Development, 1(1), 67-87. Tomasello, M., & Kruger, A. C. (1992). Joint attention on actions: Acquiring verbs in ostensive and non- ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language, 19(2), 311-333. Tomasello, M., & Barton, M. E. (1994). Learning words in nonostensive contexts. Developmental Psychology, 30(5), 639. Waxman, S. R., & Booth, A. E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: Fourteen-month-olds' interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive Psychology, 43(3), 217-242. Waxman, S. R., & Markow, D. B. (1998). Object properties and object kind: Twenty‐one‐month‐old infants' extension of novel adjectives. Child Development, 69(5), 1313-1329. Supplementary Information: Types of studies What children know about their language already. What do they know and when? Looking while listening/pointing (comprehension) Recording how children talk in naturalistic settings, asking them to name things (production) Teaching children new words in the lab. What can they learn? How do they learn? Supplementary Videos Another example of an overextension Supplementary Videos (1) Child learning words in American Sign Language Can you see both comprehension and production?  Supplementary Videos (2) A video about early word learning  Supplementary Videos (3) A video about early word production  Supplementary Videos (4) Joint attention and word learning