Infant word segmentation revisited: edge alignment facilitates target extraction

In a landmark study, Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) demonstrated that English-learning infants are able to segment words from continuous speech at 7.5 months of age. In the current study, we explored the possibility that infants segment words from the edges of utterances more readily than the middle of utterances. The same procedure was used as in Jusczyk and Aslin (1995); however, our stimuli were controlled for target word location and infants were given a shorter familiarization time to avoid ceiling effects. Infants were familiarized to one word that always occurred at the edge of an utterance (sentence-initial position for half of the infants and sentence-final position for the other half) and one word that always occurred in sentence-medial position. Our results demonstrate that infants segment words from the edges of an utterance more readily than from the middle of an utterance. In addition, infants segment words from utterance-final position just as readily as they segment words from utterance-initial position. Possible explanations for these results, as well as their implications for current models of the development of word segmentation, are discussed.     

中文文本熟悉性在词切分和词汇识别中的作用

基于E-Z读者模型和中文阅读的整合模型, 词切分和词汇识别是否属于交互作用的统一过程存在争议。通过转换阅读方向来操纵文本熟悉性, 研究其在词切分和词汇识别中的作用。实验1考察中文文本熟悉性和词间空格促进作用之间的权衡。使用Eyelink 1000记录40名大学生在中文阅读中的眼动特征。结果发现：词间空格对中文阅读的促进作用在阅读训练后消失, 表明中文阅读中文本熟悉性和词间空格的促进作用之间存在权衡。实验2操纵文本熟悉性和词频来探究文本熟悉性在词汇识别中的作用, 结果发现：文本熟悉性和词频在早期指标上的交互作用; 阅读训练和词频不存在交互作用, 表明文本熟悉性影响词汇识别的早期加工阶段。研究结果表明中文阅读的词切分和词汇识别可能是顺序加工, 支持E-Z读者模型。     

Short-term memory for serial order supports vocabulary development: New evidence from a novel word learning paradigm

Although recent studies suggest a strong association between short-term memory (STM) for serial order and lexical development, the precise mechanisms linking the two domains remain to be determined. This study explored the nature of these mechanisms via a microanalysis of performance on serial order STM and novel word learning tasks. In the experiment, 6- and 7-year-old children were administered tasks maximizing STM for either item or serial order information as well as paired-associate learning tasks involving the learning of novel words, visual symbols, or familiar word pair associations. Learning abilities for novel words were specifically predicted by serial order STM abilities. A measure estimating the precision of serial order coding predicted the rate of correct repetitions and the rate of phoneme migration errors during the novel word learning process. In line with recent theoretical accounts, these results suggest that serial order STM supports vocabulary development via ordered and detailed reactivation of the novel phonological sequences that characterize new words.     

Children's early reading vocabulary: Description and word frequency lists

Background: When constructing stimuli for experimental investigations of cognitive processes in early reading development, researchers have to rely on adult or American children's word frequency counts, as no such counts exist for English children. Aim: The present paper introduces a database of children's early reading vocabulary, for use by researchers and teachers. Sample: Texts from 685 books from reading schemes and story books read by 5‐7 year‐old children were used in the construction of the database. Method: All words from the 685 books were typed or scanned into an Oracle database. Results: The resulting up‐to‐date word frequency list of early print exposure in the UK is available in two forms from a website address given in this paper. This allows access to one list of the words ordered alphabetically and one list of the words ordered by frequency. We also briefly address some fundamental issues underlying early reading vocabulary (e.g., that it is heavily skewed towards low frequencies). Other characteristics of the vocabulary are then discussed. Conclusions: We hope the word frequency lists will be of use to researchers seeking to control word frequency, and to teachers interested in the vocabulary to which young children are exposed in their reading material.     

Speed of word recognition and vocabulary knowledge in infancy predict cognitive and language outcomes in later childhood

The nature of predictive relations between early language and later cognitive function is a fundamental question in research on human cognition. In a longitudinal study assessing speed of language processing in infancy, Fernald, Perfors and Marchman (2006) found that reaction time at 25 months was strongly related to lexical and grammatical development over the second year. In this follow-up study, children originally tested as infants were assessed at 8 years on standardized tests of language, cognition, and working memory. Speed of spoken word recognition and vocabulary size at 25 months each accounted for unique variance in linguistic and cognitive skills at 8 years, effects that were attributable to strong relations between both infancy measures and working memory. These findings suggest that processing speed and early language skills are fundamental to intellectual functioning, and that language development is guided by learning and representational principles shared across cognitive and linguistic domains.     

Facet analysis in the development of a general controlled vocabulary

Nuovo Soggettario is a verbal subject indexing system renewing the existing Soggettario used in many Italian libraries. The renewal work consists of substantive improvements in the structure and the relationships of the system, now making it a true faceted thesaurus. Facet analysis is a key part of this development, both in identifying a set of facets and categories to which terms in the thesaurus belong, and in providing a scheme of the roles they can play within a subject string, as well as rules for their citation order.     

Sibling influences on gender development in middle childhood and early adolescence: a longitudinal study

The development of gender role qualities (attitudes, personality, leisure activities) from middle childhood to early adolescence was studied to determine whether siblings' gender role qualities predicted those of their sisters and brothers. Participants were 198 firstborn and second-born siblings (Ms = 10 years 9 months and 8 years 3 months, respectively, in Year 1) and their parents. Families were interviewed annually for 3 years. Firstborn siblings' qualities in Year 1 predicted second-born children's qualities in Year 3 when both parent and child qualities in Year 1 were controlled, a pattern consistent with a social learning model of sibling influence. Parental influence was more evident and sibling influence less evident in predicting firstborns' qualities; for firstborns, sibling influences suggested a de-identification process.     

Well-being vocabulary in media language: An analysis of changing word usage in Norwegian newspapers

Well-being is a widely discussed topic in research, policy, and media. This study was aimed at examining usage patterns of core terminology related to well-being in Norwegian newspapers during the past two decades. Specifically, we investigated occurrence across time of 39 words describing well-being facets from four theoretical perspectives: affective approaches, cognitive or life satisfaction approaches, eudaimonic and humanistic approaches, and character strengths. Four major newspapers were selected in order to capture sociocultural and regional variation. Evidence of significant changes in usage frequency was detected for about half of the search terms. Affective words showed variable trends, while usage of words referring to satisfaction declined. The most notable magnitude of change concerned the increase in eudaimonic words related to mastery, motivation, and self-development. Findings suggest that core vocabulary of well-being belongs to a changeable field of linguistic practice. Implications for positive psychology are proposed.     

Eye movements,word familiarity,and vocabulary acquisition

Two experiments examined the effects of word familiarity on word recognition and text comprehension during silent reading. Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing words that varied in familiarity as assessed by printed estimates of word frequency, subjective ratings of familiarity, and a multiple‐choice test of meaning knowledge. Effects of word frequency were unaffected by differences in subjective familiarity rating for high frequency words. Differential effects of familiarity rating were observed in low frequency conditions. In addition, processing time on high and low frequency words did not differ when familiarity was held constant for moderately familiar words. Readers spent more initial processing time on novel words than familiar words. Performance on a vocabulary test administered after the reading session demonstrated that readers successfully acquired and retained new word meanings. Finally, reanalysis of word processing time as a function of vocabulary test performance demonstrated a systematic relationship between online processing patterns and memory for novel word meaning.     

More is more: The relationship between vocabulary size and word extension

This study experimentally tested the relationship between children’s lexicon size and their ability to learn new words within the domain of color. We manipulated the size of 25 20-month-olds’ color lexicons by training them with two, four, or six different color words over the course of eight training sessions. We subsequently tested children’s ability to extend new color words to new instances. We found that training with a broader number of color words led to increased extension of new words. The results suggest that children’s learning history predicts their ability to learn new words within domains.     

Phonemes, rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations of early reading development: evidence from a longitudinal study

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 90 British children beginning at school entry when they were 4 years 9 months old (range = 4 years 2 months to 5 years 2 months). The relationships among early phonological skills, letter knowledge, grammatical skills, and vocabulary knowledge were investigated as predictors of word recognition and reading comprehension. Word recognition skills were consistently predicted by earlier measures of letter knowledge and phoneme sensitivity (but not by vocabulary knowledge, rhyme skills, or grammatical skills). In contrast, reading comprehension was predicted by prior word recognition skills, vocabulary knowledge, and grammatical skills. The results are related to current theories about the role of phonological, grammatical, and vocabulary skills in the development of early reading skills.     

From terrible twos to sassy sixes: The development of vocabulary and executive functioning across early childhood

Across the early childhood period of development, young children exhibit considerable growth in their executive functioning (EF) and vocabulary abilities. Understanding the developmental trajectory of these seemingly interrelated processes is important as both early vocabulary and EF have been shown to predict critical academic and socio-emotional outcomes later in childhood. Although previous research suggests that EF and vocabulary are correlated in early childhood, much of the existing longitudinal research has focused on unidirectional relations among preschool child samples. The current large-scale study, therefore, sought to examine whether children's vocabulary and EF abilities are bidirectionally related over time across four measurement waves in early childhood (i.e., at ages 2, 3, 4, and 6). At each timepoint, children's vocabulary skills were positively correlated with their concurrent EF abilities. After controlling for child sex and maternal education status, the best-fitting, cross-lagged panel model was a unidirectional model whereby children's early vocabulary scores predicted their later EF performance at each timepoint. Although age 2 EF significantly predicted age 3 vocabulary size, this association was no longer significant after accounting for maternal education status. Our results illustrate that vocabulary size plays an important role in predicting children's later EF performance across various timepoints in early childhood, even after controlling for children's initial EF scores. These findings have important implications for intervention research as fostering early vocabulary acquisition may serve as a possible avenue for improving EF outcomes in young children.

Research Highlights

• Children's vocabulary size is positively correlated with their concurrent executive functioning skill at ages 2, 3, 4, and 6
• Young children's early vocabulary scores predict their later EF performance across measurement waves, even after controlling for initial EF skill
• There is stability in children's relative vocabulary size and executive functioning performance over time in early childhood

     

Infant temperament and noncompliant behavior at four years: a longitudinal study

Noncompliant behavior in early childhood (i.e., exaggerated, but age-appropriate negativism) has been inadequately studied. This longitudinal study explores preschool temperament and maternal behavior as current correlates of negativistic behavior at age 4, and early maternal characteristics and infant temperament as etiological variables in the production of negativism. Longitudinal evidence was collected from 62 mother-child dyads, representative of all social classes. This evidence included home observations of maternal and child behavior at 4 years, a temperament questionnaire at 4 years, a questionnaire about infant temperament, and observational and interview measures at various stages from birth to 3 years, of infant behavior and maternal characteristics. The findings suggest that infant and childhood temperament (especially the degree of infant fussiness) are highly predictive of physical noncompliance, and that physical noncompliance is unrelated to maternal or demographic variables. A combination of maternal variables including warmth, closeness, and verbal directiveness, both positive and negative, as well as child variables, predict verbal noncompliance. Demographic variables, temperament, and maternal attitudes predict passive noncompliance. Noncompliance is viewed as a complex phenomenon in which constitutional and environmental variables interact.     

Word knowledge in the crowd: Measuring vocabulary size and word prevalence in a massive online experiment

We use the results of a large online experiment on word knowledge in Dutch to investigate variables influencing vocabulary size in a large population and to examine the effect of word prevalence—the percentage of a population knowing a word—as a measure of word occurrence. Nearly 300,000 participants were presented with about 70 word stimuli (selected from a list of 53,000 words) in an adapted lexical decision task. We identify age, education, and multilingualism as the most important factors influencing vocabulary size. The results suggest that the accumulation of vocabulary throughout life and in multiple languages mirrors the logarithmic growth of number of types with number of tokens observed in text corpora (Herdan's law). Moreover, the vocabulary that multilinguals acquire in related languages seems to increase their first language (L1) vocabulary size and outweighs the loss caused by decreased exposure to L1. In addition, we show that corpus word frequency and prevalence are complementary measures of word occurrence covering a broad range of language experiences. Prevalence is shown to be the strongest independent predictor of word processing times in the Dutch Lexicon Project, making it an important variable for psycholinguistic research.     

Infant speech perception and cognitive skills as predictors of later vocabulary

Research has identified bivariate correlations between speech perception and cognitive measures gathered during infancy as well as correlations between these individual measures and later language outcomes. However, these correlations have not all been explored together in prospective longitudinal studies. The goal of the current research was to compare how early speech perception and cognitive skills predict later language outcomes using a within-participant design. To achieve this goal, we tested 97 5- to 7-month-olds on two speech perception tasks (stress pattern preference, native vowel discrimination) and two cognitive tasks (visual recognition memory, A-not-B) and later assessed their vocabulary outcomes at 18 and 24 months. Frequentist statistical analyses showed that only native vowel discrimination significantly predicted vocabulary. However, Bayesian analyses suggested that evidence was ambiguous between null and alternative hypotheses for all infant predictors. These results highlight the importance of recognizing and addressing challenges related to infant data collection, interpretation, and replication in the developmental field, a roadblock in our route to understanding the contribution of domain-specific and domain-general skills for language acquisition. Future methodological development and research along similar lines is encouraged to assess individual differences in infant speech perception and cognitive skills and their predictability for language development.     

Spectral tilt as a cue to word segmentation in infancy and adulthood

Across a variety of tasks, adults respond differently to syllables with multiple stress cues than to syllables with only one cue to stress. This series of experiments was designed to explore how infants and adults use partial stress as a cue to word boundaries. In the first experiment, 9-month-old infants treated syllables with only one cue to stress (spectral tilt) as a strong cue to word boundaries. The second experiment shows that whereas adults treat syllables with multiple cues to stress as word onsets, they do not consider syllables marked only by spectral tilt to be strong indicators of word boundaries. Thethird experiment shows that 1-year-old infants are more adultlike than 9-month-olds in their use of stress cues. Taken together, these results suggest a rapid development of stress cue knowledge in infancy, perhaps due to infants' experience with word segmentation.     

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: Cross-linguistic evidence

Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence for this invariance effect and to increase its ecological validity, adult English speakers (n=276) were exposed to naturally spoken Dutch or Russian pseudonouns presented in sentence contexts. A forced choice test was given to assess target recognition, with foils comprising unfamiliar syllable combinations in Experiments 1 and 2 and syllable combinations straddling word boundaries in Experiment 3. A control group (n=210) received the recognition test with no prior exposure to targets. Recognition performance improved with increasing final-syllable rhyme invariance, with larger increases for the experimental group. This confirms that word ending invariance is a valid segmentation cue in artificial, as well as naturalistic, speech and that diminutives may aid segmentation in a number of languages.