Argument structure and the child's contribution to language learning

One of the oldest questions in cognitive science asks whether children are able to learn language (or anything) because they are equipped with a very powerful general-purpose learning mechanism or because they are equipped with a domain-specific constrained language acquisition device. Recent advances in statistical approaches to language learning seem to boost the plausibility of general-purpose learning. However, in this article we propose that in the domain of verb learning, children rely more on their internally generated preconceptions about linguistic structure than on robust cues in the input, suggesting that at least in this aspect of language learning, domain-specific grammatical knowledge guides linguistic development.     

Incidental Foreign-Language Acquisition by Children Watching Subtitled Television Programs

Previous research on adults has demonstrated incidental foreign-language acquisition by watching subtitled television programs in a foreign language. Based on these findings and the literature about the sensitive period for language acquisition, we expected the acquisition to be larger with children. A short subtitled cartoon was presented to Dutch-speaking children (8–12 years old). We varied the channel in which the foreign and native languages were presented (sound track and subtitles); we also looked at the effects of the existing knowledge of the foreign language (due to formal teaching at school) and the linguistic similarity between the native and the foreign language (using Danish and French as foreign languages). We obtained real but limited foreign-language acquisition and in contrast to the sensitive language-acquisition hypothesis, the learning of the children was not superior to that of adults investigated in prior studies. The acquisition here does not profit from the more formal language learning at school. Contrary to the adults, the children tend to acquire more when the foreign language is in the sound track than in the subtitles.     

The secret is in the sound: from unsegmented speech to lexical categories

When learning language, young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determine their lexical category, and we propose an integrated model of how children might go from unsegmented speech to lexical categories. We corroborated this theoretical model using a two‐stage computational analysis of a large corpus of English child‐directed speech. First, we used transition probabilities between phonemes to find words in unsegmented speech. Second, we used distributional information about word edges – the beginning and ending phonemes of words – to predict whether the segmented words from the first stage were nouns, verbs, or something else. The results indicate that discovering lexical units and their associated syntactic category in child‐directed speech is possible by attending to the statistics of single phoneme transitions and word‐initial and final phonemes. Thus, we suggest that a core computational principle in language acquisition is that the same source of information is used to learn about different aspects of linguistic structure.     

‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence

Gold's [1967. Language identification in the limit. Information and Control, 16, 447-474] celebrated work on learning in the limit has been taken, by many cognitive scientists, to have powerful negative implications for the learnability of language from positive data (i.e., from mere exposure to linguistic input). This provides one, of several, lines of argument that language acquisition must draw on other sources of information, including innate constraints on learning. We consider an ‘ideal learner’ that applies a Simplicity Principle to the problem of language acquisition. The Simplicity Principle chooses the hypothesis that provides the briefest representation of the available data—here, the data are the linguistic input to the child. The Simplicity Principle allows learning from positive evidence alone, given quite weak assumptions, in apparent contrast to results on language learnability in the limit (e.g., Gold, 1967). These results provide a framework for reconsidering the learnability of various aspects of natural language from positive evidence, which has been at the center of theoretical debate in research on language acquisition and linguistics.     

A computational model of early argument structure acquisition

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions —associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions.     

Ordinal knowledge: number names and number concepts in Chinese and English.

Previous research has demonstrated cross-language variation in early counting associated with linguistic differences in number-naming systems. Ordinal number names are typically learned later than cardinal names, but languages also differ in the regularity with which they form these names. Elementary school children in China and the U.S. showed differences in the acquisition and use of ordinal numbers corresponding to linguistic differences in ordinal names in their native languages. On tasks assessing children's conceptual knowledge of ordinal relations, a more complicated picture emerged. These results suggest that (a) children induce their language's set of ordinal number names by generalization based on rules sanctioned by early examples, and (b) the relation between ordinal names and ordinal concepts is a complex one, with language only one source of difficulty in understanding ordinal relations. Implications for studies of the relation between linguistic structure and cognitive development are discussed, in particular the possibility that effects of linguistic differences may vary for different levels of development and for different aspects of cognition.     

Things Are What They Do: Katherine Nelson's Functional Approach to Language and Cognition

This article attempts to summarize Katherine Nelson's theoretical and empirical contributions to the ontogenetic study of language and cognition. Nelson's approach has consistently emphasized the function of language and linguistic concepts in children's larger conceptual and social lives and, conversely, how children's emerging understanding of the function of linguistic symbols in larger conceptual and social structures makes language acquisition possible in the first place. This approach has led to an especially fruitful body of theoretical and empirical work.     

Native Amazonian children forego egalitarianism in merit‐based tasks when they learn to count

Cooperation often results in a final material resource that must be shared, but deciding how to distribute that resource is not straightforward. A distribution could count as fair if all members receive an equal reward (egalitarian distributions), or if each member's reward is proportional to their merit (merit‐based distributions). Here, we propose that the acquisition of numerical concepts influences how we reason about fairness. We explore this possibility in the Tsimane’, a farming‐foraging group who live in the Bolivian rainforest. The Tsimane’ learn to count in the same way children from industrialized countries do, but at a delayed and more variable timeline, allowing us to de‐confound number knowledge from age and years in school. We find that Tsimane’ children who can count produce merit‐based distributions, while children who cannot count produce both merit‐based and egalitarian distributions. Our findings establish that the ability to count – a non‐universal, language‐dependent, cultural invention – can influence social cognition.     

What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.     

Language growth with experience without feedback

The relationship between language input and the precise way the child makes use of that input is a complex problem. Most research has concentrated on specific forms in the input and their later production by the child. It may be, however, that the child controls more of the acquisition process than previous input studies have assumed. Experience of particular language forms may be all that is required for internal organizational processes to operate. This longitudinal study investigated language growth in children using a structure they had not yet mastered. Experience of this structure at 3-month intervals over the course of 1 year—without any feedback that children were interpreting some instances incorrectly—led to accelerated acquisition as compared with the ages observed in children tested cross-sectionally. It is argued that exposure to a linguistic structure that induces the child to operate on that structure can lead to a reorganization of linguistic knowledge even though no direct feedback has been given as to its correct adult interpretation.     

The language of social pretend play

The literature dealing with the structure and communication of social pretend play activity in preschool-age children is examined. The two objectives of this review were to determine (1) whether there are any differences in the linguistic forms and expressions children use in pretend as opposed to nonpretend activity and (2) whether age-related differences appear in the language of social pretending over the preschool years. The results of a cross-sectional study of a number of linguistic features occurring in the pretend and nonpretend activities of 35 dyads of children are also presented. The evidence supports the hypotheses that the language of social pretending differs from that of other social activities at several levels of language organization and that some of these differences in the “language of social pretending” appear at different ages during the preschool years. Suggestions are made for further research on the communicative techniques by which social pretend interactions are achieved.     

Individual differences in the acquisition of non‐linguistic audio‐visual associations in 5 year olds

Audio‐visual associative learning – at least when linguistic stimuli are employed – is known to rely on core linguistic skills such as phonological awareness. Here we ask whether this would also be the case in a task that does not manipulate linguistic information. Another question of interest is whether executive skills, often found to support learning, may play a larger role in a non‐linguistic audio‐visual associative task compared to a linguistic one. We present a new task that measures learning when having to associate non‐linguistic auditory signals with novel visual shapes. Importantly, our novel task shares with linguistic processes such as reading acquisition the need to associate sounds with arbitrary shapes. Yet, rather than phonemes or syllables, it uses novel environmental sounds – therefore limiting direct reliance on linguistic abilities. Five‐year‐old French‐speaking children (N = 76, 39 girls) were assessed individually in our novel audio‐visual associative task, as well as in a number of other cognitive tasks evaluating linguistic abilities and executive functions. We found phonological awareness and language comprehension to be related to scores in the audio‐visual associative task, while no correlation with executive functions was observed. These results underscore a key relation between foundational language competencies and audio‐visual associative learning, even in the absence of linguistic input in the associative task.     

Methodological issues in language acquisition research with very young children

It is suggested that the dominance of observational methods in child language research with very young children has limited progress in understanding the language acquisition process. Evidence is presented that, contrary to popular belief, naturalistic methods do not guarantee ecological validity, nor are they free of task biases. Furthermore, observational studies do not necessarily provide better measures of linguistic competence than do more structured methods. Instead, it is argued that new insights from cognitive developmental research are applicable in studying language production in children younger than 3 years. A number of structured techniques are reviewed that have been used or could be used to study language production. It is concluded that a combination of methods is necessary in order to disentangle and control the many variables that enter into the language acquisition process.     

The logical syntax of number words: Theory, acquisition and processing

Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. Cognition93, 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282; Hurewitz, F., Papafragou, A., Gleitman, L., Gelman, R. (2006). Asymmetries in the acquisition of numbers and quantifiers. Language Learning and Development, 2, 76-97; Huang, Y. T., Snedeker, J., Spelke, L. (submitted for publication). What exactly do numbers mean?]. Specifically, these studies have shown that data from experimental investigations of child language can be used to illuminate core theoretical issues in the semantic and pragmatic analysis of number terms. In this article, I extend this approach to the logico-syntactic properties of number words, focusing on the way numerals interact with each other (e.g. Three boys are holding two balloons) as well as with other quantified expressions (e.g. Three boys are holding each balloon). On the basis of their intuitions, linguists have claimed that such sentences give rise to at least four different interpretations, reflecting the complexity of the linguistic structure and syntactic operations involved. Using psycholinguistic experimentation with preschoolers (n = 32) and adult speakers of English (n = 32), I show that (a) for adults, the intuitions of linguists can be verified experimentally, (b) by the age of 5, children have knowledge of the core aspects of the logical syntax of number words, (c) in spite of this knowledge, children nevertheless differ from adults in systematic ways, (d) the differences observed between children and adults can be accounted for on the basis of an independently motivated, linguistically-based processing model [Geurts, B. (2003). Quantifying kids. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 197-218]. In doing so, this work ties together research on the acquisition of the number vocabulary with a growing body of work on the development of quantification and sentence processing abilities in young children [Geurts, 2003; Lidz, J., Musolino, J. (2002). Children’s command of quantification. Cognition, 84, 113-154; Musolino, J., Lidz, J. (2003). The scope of isomorphism: Turning adults into children. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 277-291; Trueswell, J., Sekerina, I., Hilland, N., Logrip, M. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134; Noveck, I. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78, 165-188; Noveck, I., Guelminger, R., Georgieff, N., & Labruyere, N. (2007). What autism can tell us about every . . . not sentences. Journal of Semantics,24(1), 73-90. On a more general level, this work confirms the importance of integrating formal and developmental perspectives [Musolino, 2004], this time by highlighting the explanatory power of linguistically-based models of language acquisition and by showing that the complex structure postulated by linguists has important implications for developmental accounts of the number vocabulary.     

Children's associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language

Musical properties, such as auditory pitch, are not expressed in the same way across cultures. In some languages, pitch is expressed in terms of spatial height (high vs. low), whereas others rely on thickness vocabulary (thick = low frequency vs. thin = high frequency). We investigated how children represent pitch in the face of this variable linguistic input by examining the developmental trajectory of linguistic and non-linguistic space-pitch associations in children who acquire Dutch (a height-pitch language) or Turkish (a thickness-pitch language). Five-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and 11-year-olds were tested for their understanding of pitch terminology and their associations of spatial dimensions with auditory pitch when no language was used. Across tasks, thickness-pitch associations were more robust than height-pitch associations. This was true for Turkish children, and also Dutch children not exposed to thickness-pitch vocabulary. Height-pitch associations, on the other hand, were not reliable—not even in Dutch-speaking children until age 11—the age when they demonstrated full comprehension of height-pitch terminology. Moreover, Turkish-speaking children reversed height-pitch associations. Taken together, these findings suggest thickness-pitch associations are acquired in similar ways by children from different cultures, but the acquisition of height-pitch associations is more susceptible to linguistic input. Overall, then, despite cross-cultural stability in some components, there is variation in how children come to represent musical pitch, one of the building blocks of music.

Research Highlights

• Children from diverse cultures differ in their understanding of music vocabulary and in their nonlinguistic associations between spatial dimensions and auditory pitch.
• Height-pitch mappings are acquired late and require additional scaffolding from language, whereas thickness-pitch mappings are acquired early and are less susceptible to language input.
• Space-pitch mappings are not static from birth to adulthood, but change over development, suggesting music cognition is shaped by cross-cultural experience.

     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien-Language-Learning Experiment

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre-existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial-language-learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language-learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning.     

Mental models,pictures, and text: Integration of spatial and verbal information

In the past several years, there has been an acceleration in the publication of cognitive research on the interplay between linguistic and pictorial/spatial information. To report on and encourage this sort of research, we organized a symposium at the 1991 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. The articles in this special section ofMemory & Cognition are based on the work presented at the symposium. In this introduction, we offer a suggestion forwhy the integration of linguistic and spatial information is not only a possibility, but a requirement for effective communication. Our suggestion follows the linguistic analysis of the closed-class elements that convey spatial relations, the prepositions (Talmy, 1983). The structure of language provides but a small set of prepositions to encode the vast number of spatial relations that we can perceive. Thus, to understand a situation that a speaker or a writer is conveying, the listener or reader must combine linguistic information with (perhaps metric) spatial information derived from pictures, the environment, or memory.     

Once a French Speaker,Always a French Speaker? Bilingual Children's Thinking About the Stability of Language

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five‐to six‐year‐old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language‐match. Yet French‐English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race‐match, especially when tested in their non‐dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non‐dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization.