From grammatical number to exact numbers: early meanings of 'one', 'two', and 'three' in English, Russian, and Japanese

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words 'one,' 'two,' and 'three.' First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use. Then young children in the USA, Russia, and Japan were tested on Counting and Give-N tasks. More English and Russian learners knew the meaning of each number word than Japanese learners, regardless of whether singular/plural cues appeared in the task itself (e.g., "Give two apples" vs. "Give two"). These results suggest that the learning of "one," "two" and "three" is supported by the conceptual framework of grammatical number, rather than that of integers.     

Finding one's meaning: a test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development

We explored children’s early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. Daedalus, 59-68) that children’s initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two, three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular and plural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languages without singular-plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, children acquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languages like English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate this relation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English. We found a significant correlation between children’s comprehension of numerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners, even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that 2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology and the word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular noun phrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example, in a Truth-Value Judgment task, most children judged that a banana was consistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for the numeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nouns did not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children who did not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that children distinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning, assigning exact interpretations only to numerals.     

Language, thought, and real nouns

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence that learning mass-count syntax has little effect on the interpretation of familiar nouns between Japanese and English, and that speakers of these languages do not divide up referents differently along an individuation continuum, as claimed in some previous reports [Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 215-256). Cambridge University Press]. Instead, we argue that previous cross-linguistic differences [Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169-200] are attributable to “lexical statistics” [Gleitman, L., & Papafragou, A. (2005). Language and thought. In K. Holyoak, & R. Morrison (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 633-661). Cambridge University Press]. Speakers of English are more likely to think that a novel ambiguous expression like “the blicket” refers to a kind of object (relative to speakers of Japanese) because speakers of English are likely to assume that “blicket” is a count noun rather than a mass noun, based on the relative frequency of each kind of word in English. This is confirmed by testing Mandarin-English bilinguals with a word extension task. We find that bilinguals tested in English with mass-count ambiguous syntax extend novel words like English monolinguals (and assume that a word like “blicket” refers to a kind of object). In contrast, bilinguals tested in Mandarin are significantly more likely to extend novel words by material. Thus, online lexical statistics, rather than non-linguistic thought, mediate cross-linguistic differences in word extension. We suggest that speakers of Mandarin, English, and Japanese draw on a universal set of lexical meanings, and that mass-count syntax allows speakers of English to select among these meanings.     

Meaning matters in children's plural productions

The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from 2-year-old children for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic-level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well-known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. The results provide new evidence on children's acquisition of the English plural, showing that children's early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural.     

拼音在方言儿童字词学习中的作用

本研究比较了以普通话与以方言为口语的儿童在根据拼音来学习生词或再认熟词时的成绩。研究结果发现 ,与普通话组相比 ,拼音对方言组儿童学习字词的积极作用在帮助他们再认已学过的词时最大。由于方言的影响 ,除了再认已学过的词汇外 ,拼音对方言儿童的积极作用明显不如学普通话的儿童。而对于普通话组来说 ,拼音更能够帮助儿童学习口语中熟悉的生词 ,而且对由一个生字组成的概念熟悉的词的积极影响大于由两个生字组成的概念熟悉的词。     

语境和构词法线索对外国学生汉语词义猜测的作用

要求学习汉语的欧美和日本留学生对三种条件下(只有词没有语境、只有语境没有词、既有词也有语境)的语义半透明的双音复合词进行猜测, 考察语境和构词法线索在欧美和日本留学生汉语生词猜测中的作用。结果显示：在猜测词义中语境和构词法线索分别都能提供一定的信息, 但同时提供两种信息能得到更好的猜测; 语境和构词法线索在生词猜测过程中所起的作用不同, 语境能提供更多句法上的信息, 构词法能提供更多语义上的信息; 目标词的结构方式对生词猜测产生影响, 与动宾式生词相比, 偏正式生词的猜测较为容易且构词法线索在其中的作用较大; 母语文字背景可能影响词义猜测的效果, 日本留学生对于构词法、语境线索以及两者的整合都比欧美留学生好。     

What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free-play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty-four 1.5-2-year-olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English-Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free-play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word-referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word-referent mappings.     

Language and age effects in children's processing of word order

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1–3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical word order of their language, paired with two visual scenes, only one of which matched the sentence. Multiple measures of comprehension (percent of looking to match, latency to look to match, number of switches of attention) revealed a general pattern of early sensitivity to word order, coupled with language and age effects in children's processing efficiency. In particular, English learners showed temporally speedier processing of transitive sentences than Turkish learners, who also displayed more uncertainty about the matching scene. Mandarin learners behaved like Turkish learners in showing slower processing of sentences, and all language groups displayed faster processing by older than younger children. These results demonstrate that sentence processing is sensitive to crosslinguistic features beginning early in language development.     

Tracking Multiple Statistics: Simultaneous Learning of Object Names and Categories in English and Mandarin Speakers

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities.     

Influences of lexical tone and pitch on word recognition in bilingual infants

Infants' abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual learners. There is relatively little research on other types of phonetic segments, such as lexical tone, even though tone languages are very well represented across languages of the world. The goal of the present study is to investigate how Mandarin Chinese-English bilingual learners contend with non-phonemic pitch variation in English spoken word recognition. This is contrasted with their treatment of phonemic changes in lexical tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition. The experimental design was cross-sectional and three age-groups were sampled (7.5months, 9months and 11months). Results demonstrated limited generalization abilities at 7.5months, where infants only recognized words in English when matched in pitch and words in Mandarin that were matched in tone. At 9months, infants recognized words in Mandarin Chinese that matched in tone, but also falsely recognized words that contrasted in tone. At this age, infants also recognized English words whether they were matched or mismatched in pitch. By 11months, infants correctly recognized pitch-matched and - mismatched words in English but only recognized tonal matches in Mandarin Chinese.     

Cue strength in second-language processing: An eye-tracking study

This study used eye-tracking and grammaticality judgement measures to examine how second-language (L2) learners process syntactic violations in English. Participants were native Arabic and native Mandarin Chinese speakers studying English as an L2, and monolingual English-speaking controls. The violations involved incorrect word order and differed in two ways predicted to be important by the unified competition model [UCM; MacWhinney, B. (2005). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49–67). Oxford: Oxford University Press.]. First, one violation had more and stronger cues to ungrammaticality than the other. Second, the grammaticality of these word orders varied in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Sensitivity to violations was relatively quick overall, across all groups. Sensitivity also was related to the number and strength of cues to ungrammaticality regardless of native language, which is consistent with the general principles of the UCM. However, there was little evidence of cross-language transfer effects in either eye movements or grammaticality judgements.     

Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this arbitrariness assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking monolinguals learned meanings for Japanese words in a vocabulary-learning task. Spoken Japanese words were paired with English meanings that: (1) matched the actual meaning of the Japanese word (e.g., “hayai” paired with fast); (2) were antonyms for the actual meaning (e.g., “hayai” paired with slow); or (3) were randomly selected from the set of antonyms (e.g., “hayai” paired with blunt). The results showed that participants learned the actual English equivalents and antonyms for Japanese words more accurately and responded faster than when learning randomly paired meanings. These findings suggest that natural languages contain non-arbitrary links between sound structure and meaning and further, that learners are sensitive to these non-arbitrary relationships within spoken language.     

Acquisition of the Mental State Verb Know by 2- to 5-Year-Old Children

The production of the cognitive internal state word know by four 2- to 5-year-old children and their parents was examined. The levels of meaning of cognitive words can be categorized hierarchically along the dimensions of conceptual difficulty and abstractness (see Booth & Hall, 1995). The present study found that children and their parents expressed low levels of meaning less frequently, whereas they expressed high levels of meaning more frequently as a function of age. The children's use of know was also correlated positively with (1) their number of different words produced suggesting that cognitive words are related to more general semantic processes, and (2) with parental use of those same cognitive words suggesting that parental linguistic input may be an important mechanism in cognitive word acquisition. Finally, young children tended to use know more to refer to themselves than to refer to others, whereas their parents tended to use know equally to refer to self and others. The importance of cognitive words in a theory of language acquisition is discussed.     

Some attractions of verb agreement

In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually singular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plural. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and conceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual numbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammatically plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. The findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily to the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the evidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like English and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number morphing, in which number meaning plays different parts.     

Learning names for materials: Factors constraining and limiting hypotheses about word meaning

Children's ability to learn new words quickly (Carey, 1978; Dickinson, 1984b; Heibeck & Markman, in press) indicates that they have strategies for constraining hypotheses about word meaning. The initial hypotheses children entertain about the meaning of words that name materials were examined in two studies. The first study examined the effects of linguistic constraint supplied by count/mass syntactic information and of conceptual constraints—Object Bias for Solids (i.e., words applied to solids name objects, not materials; Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1985), and Substance Bias for Nonsolids (i.e., words applied to nonsolids name materials). A second study investigated the effects of providing more explicit information about word meaning by including the phrase “made of” when words were presented. In both studies, 16 children, aged 3, 4, and 5, were introduced to an object or material and told a name for it in phrases that varied the information provided. They then were shown two items and asked to indicate which was an example of the presentation stimulus. Mass syntax was somewhat effective in helping children map words to material concepts, but conceptual constraints were more important. Children of all ages were poor at learning names for materials when the word referred to unfamiliar objects made of unfamiliar materials, but the phrase “made of” helped reduce the effect of the Object Bias for Solids among 5-year-olds. Age-related developments suggest that acquisition of material names also is affected by improving access to material concepts.     

A probabilistic computational model of cross-situational word learning

Words are the essence of communication: They are the building blocks of any language. Learning the meaning of words is thus one of the most important aspects of language acquisition: Children must first learn words before they can combine them into complex utterances. Many theories have been developed to explain the impressive efficiency of young children in acquiring the vocabulary of their language, as well as the developmental patterns observed in the course of lexical acquisition. A major source of disagreement among the different theories is whether children are equipped with special mechanisms and biases for word learning, or their general cognitive abilities are adequate for the task. We present a novel computational model of early word learning to shed light on the mechanisms that might be at work in this process. The model learns word meanings as probabilistic associations between words and semantic elements, using an incremental and probabilistic learning mechanism, and drawing only on general cognitive abilities. The results presented here demonstrate that much about word meanings can be learned from naturally occurring child-directed utterances (paired with meaning representations), without using any special biases or constraints, and without any explicit developmental changes in the underlying learning mechanism. Furthermore, our model provides explanations for the occasionally contradictory child experimental data, and offers predictions for the behavior of young word learners in novel situations.     

On the relation between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and the conceptual distinction between one and more than one

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not four objects from one. Thus, they failed to represent four objects as 'plural' or 'more than one'. Experiment 2 found that children continued to fail at the 1 vs. 4 manual-search task at 20 months of age, even when told, via explicit morpho-syntactic singular-plural cues, that one or many balls are being hidden. However, 22- and 24-month-olds succeeded both with and without verbal cues. Parental report data indicated that most 22- and 24-month-olds, but few 20-month-olds, had begun producing plural nouns in their speech. Also, the success among the older children was due to those children who had reportedly begun producing plural nouns. We discuss a possible role for language acquisition in children's deployment of set-based quantification and the distinction between singular and plural sets.     

The relation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of word meanings

Four experiments were conducted to explore the correlation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of novel words. In the first experiment, adult English speakers invented nonsense words as names for random polygons differing in visual complexity. Visually simple polygons received names containing fewer syllables than visually complex polygons did. In addition, analyses of English word-object pairings indicated that a significant correlation between syllable number and visual complexity exists in the English lexicon. In Experiments 2 and 3, adult English speakers matched monosyllabic novel words more often than trisyllabic novel words with visually simple objects, whereas trisyllabic matches were more common for visually complex objects. Experiment 4 replicated these findings with children, indicating that the assumption of a correlation between word and visual complexity exists during the period of intense vocabulary growth. Although the actual correlation between syllable number and visual complexity is small, other posited constraints on word meaning are also limited in strength. However, an increasing number of small, language-specific word-meaning correlations are being uncovered. Given the documented ability of speakers to detect and use these subtle correlations, we argue that a more fruitful approach to word-meaning acquisition would forgo the search for a few broad, powerful word-meaning constraints, and we attempt to uncover individually weak, but perhaps jointly powerful word-meaning correspondences.     

World isolation and meaning in segmentation

The effect of meaning and isolation of words on the acquisition of segmentation of words in sentences was examined with an artificial miniature language composed of Mandarin Chinese quasi-elements. Forty undergraduate students participated in one of four groups: Word No Meaning, Word Meaning, Sentence No Meaning, or Sentence Meaning. In each group the subjects listened to the same set of words, either as isolated words or in sentences. Additionally, the meaning groups saw accompanying pictorial representations of isolated words or sentences. Pretest and posttest assessments indicated that isolation of words is a significant factor in word segmentation for an initial word set restricted in size when meaning is not provided. When meaning is provided, the isolation of words apparently does not influence word segmentation performance.     

Is two a plural marker in early child language?

Is two ever a plural marker in child language? By some accounts, children bootstrap the distinction between the words one and two by observing their use with singular-plural marking (one ball/two balls). Others argue that the numeral two marks plurality before children begin using numerals to denote precise quantities. We tested the relation between numerals and singular-plural marking in English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds by asking them to label sets of objects. When children were not prompted to use numerals they hardly ever did so, although they did frequently use plural marking. Thus, it does not appear that children spontaneously use numerals like two as plural markers. Also, children who used numerals when labeling sets were significantly more likely to use a plural marker than children who did not use numerals, suggesting that most children view plural marking as obligatory when numerals are used, rather than viewing the 2 forms as alternative markers of plurality. Finally, two was no more likely than other numerals to be used with unmarked nouns (i.e., as an alternative to the plural), suggesting that it does not have a special status as a plural marker. We conclude that two is not a plural marker in early child language.