The syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift in dichotic listening

Children at two age levels, 6 to 7 years and 9 to 10 years, listened to pairs of words presented dichotically to the left and right ear either simultaneously or in immediate succession. Their task was to report what they heard after each pair. The experimental pairs involved either syntagmatic relations (e.g., bird-fly) or paradigmatic relations (table-chair). The younger children correctly identified more syntagmatic than paradigmatic pairs (using control pairs as a base) while the older children correctly identified more paradigmatic pairs. There was no difference between associated and nonassociated pairs. The results are taken to mean that pragmatic, serial relations dominate the semantic organization of younger children and that logical, hierarchical relations make their impact later in the course of development.     

Modality and Children’s Scope Understanding

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children’s acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children’s interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb yinggai ‘should,’ like ‘Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le’, whose meanings depend on the landing sites of yinggai at LF (root interpretation: Xiaohua is obligated to go to bed now. epistemic interpretation: It is the case that Xiaohua has gone to bed.). The results of truth value judgment task from 15 children (range: 4;8–6;2, mean: 5;4) and 37 adults indicate that both groups tend to interpret the ambiguous yinggai as epistemic readings and that children’s interpretation is adult-like. Thus, this study supports (Syrett and Lidz’s in Lang Acquis 16:67–81, 2009) view that 5-year-olds have adult-like LF development and their difficulties in interpreting covert movements may be reduced to extra-grammatical factors.     

On the evidence for linguistic abilities in signing apes.

F. Patterson (Brain and Language, 5, 56–71) described signing behavior by a gorilla, Koko, which she interpreted as evidence for linguistic abilities in apes. We evaluate her claim with respect to her evidence, additional evidence from other ape language studies, and studies of the sign language of the deaf. We conclude that her report does not include the appropriate data or analyses and that her conclusions are unjustified. Ape signing shows little resemblance to either the speech of hearing children or the signing of deaf children. Some nonlinguistic interpretations of this behavior and methodological issues are considered.     

Inference and exact numerical representation in early language development

How do children as young as 2 years of age know that numerals, like one, have exact interpretations, while quantifiers and words like a do not? Previous studies have argued that only numerals have exact lexical meanings. Children could not use scalar implicature to strengthen numeral meanings, it is argued, since they fail to do so for quantifiers [Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics–pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253–282]. Against this view, we present evidence that children’s early interpretation of numerals does rely on scalar implicature, and argue that differences between numerals and quantifiers are due to differences in the availability of the respective scales of which they are members. Evidence from previous studies establishes that (1) children can make scalar inferences when interpreting numerals, (2) children initially assign weak, non-exact interpretations to numerals when first acquiring their meanings, and (3) children can strengthen quantifier interpretations when scalar alternatives are made explicitly available.     

Young children's free responses to anomalous commands

Twelve children, 21–34 months old, six in R. Brown's Stage I and six in Stages II and III, responded to commands varying in length, grammaticality, and meaning. All of the children responded significantly less often when the commands were situationally anomalous and/or ungrammatical. Results failed to replicate the results of E. Shipley, E. Smith, and L. Gleitman (Language, 1969, 44, 332–342) and J. Wetstone and B. Friedlander (Child Development, 1973, 44, 743–750). The results also suggest that young children rely heavily upon situational cues in their earliest comprehension of adult speech, and this supports arguments made by J. Strohner and K. Nelson (Child Development, 45, 567–576) and R. Chapman and J. Miller (Journal of Speech and Hearing, 1975, 18, 355–371). Since subjects rely upon nonlinguistic cues to respond appropriately, syntactic competence cannot be inferred from apparent comprehension.     

Age-Related Changes in the use of Study Context to Increase Recollection

ABSTRACT

We examined how context presented at study affects recollection of words in younger and older adults. In Experiment 1, participants studied words presented with a picture of a face (context-rich condition) or a rectangle (context-weak condition), and subsequently made ‘Remember’, ‘Know’, or ‘New’ judgments to words presented alone. Younger, but not older, adults showed higher Remember accuracy following rich- than weak-context trials. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the type of processing engaged during the encoding of context–word pairs. Younger and older adults studied words presented with a picture of a face under a surface feature (gender) or binding feature (match) instruction condition. Both age groups showed higher Remember accuracy in the binding than surface instruction condition. Results suggest that providing rich contextual detail at encoding boosts later item recollection in younger adults. Older adults, however, do not spontaneously engage in the processes required to boost recollection, though instructional manipulation during encoding lessens this deficit.     

Semantic and surface codes in the memory of deaf children

In three experiments, deaf children in the age range of 6 years, 10 months to 15 years, 5 months were presented with continuous lists of items, and for each item they had to indicate whether it had appeared before on the list. Later items were related to preceding items either in surface form or in meaning or were unrelated. False-recognition errors (i.e., “yes” responses to new items) served as an index of memorial coding. In one experiment, the items presented to the subjects were printed words. The results of this experiment showed a false-recognition effect (i.e., more errors to related words than to unrelated words) for both semantically related words and orthographically similar words. In the other two experiments, the subjects viewed a series of manual signs on videotape. In these experiments, there was a false-recognition effect for signs related semantically and for signs related cherologically (i.e., similar in terms of their manual production). These results establish orthography and cherology as effective memorial codes for deaf children. The finding of a consistently strong semantic effect for young deaf children stands in contrast to findings of weak semantic effects in false-recognition studies with young hearing children. The ascendancy of semantic codes for deaf children was attributed to the absence of competition from the speech code which dominates the linguistic memory of hearing children.     

From one room to the other: a story of contamination. The relationship between child and adult analysis

Does the analyst who works with both children and adults using ostensibly the same theoretical model perform similar mental operations in these two fields? The author suggests that child analysis is rooted in a different creative process from that of adults. Comparing the analysis of children to painting and that of adults to writing, and making use of the debate between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell on the relative merits of words and images, the author explores the psychoanalytic debate on the role of child analysis in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Child analysis, initially regarded as an application of psychoanalysis, ended up acting as a catalyst for a true epistemological revolution in the 20th century through the work of Klein and Bion. Playing is not only an alternative medium to words for representing the unconscious but a different method for giving shape to representations through a specific creative process. The reverie which is born in the child analyst’s consulting room reproduces itself through the body’s actions during play, whereas in the adults’ consulting room the analyst’s capacity to dream presupposes the suspension of action. Child analysis, deploying a distinctive creative process that makes use of the body and serves itself of action in its development, may be said to rest on a similar creative process to that of figurative art. For this reason, the child analyst’s mind relates to objects in a different way, being in a more prolonged state of fusion with these as a result of ‘concentration of the body’. The significance of the unspeakable things that take place can often only be conceptualized in après‐coup. Although this difference in the development of the process suggests a significant distinction between the two ‘arts’ of child and adult analysis, the aesthetic sensitivity acquired through child analysis can be profitably used with adults, as will be demonstrated with the help of several clinical examples.     

Developmental changes in incidental memory as a function of processing level,congruity, and repetition

Second-, fifth-, and ninth-grade students (8, 11, and 14 years of age, respectively) answered acoustic and semantic questions about words which were either congruent or incongruent with the questions. Subsequently, students' free recall of the words was unexpectedly tested. For words presented once in the list, only orienting task and congruity main effects were found. For twice-presented words, grade level interacted with both variables in that older students' recall was better than younger students' only for semantically encoded, congruent words. This finding is consistant with the hypothesis that developmental increases in semantic knowledge enhance the potential for encoding elaboration, but is in apparent conflict with the results of M. F. Geis and D. M. Hall (Child Development, 1978, 49, 857–861) who found no such interaction for second- and fifth-grade children. The different age spans included in the two studies provides one resolution of the discrepancy in results. However, a second experiment tested the importance of a procedural difference between the two studies. M. F. Geis and D. M. Hall (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1976, 22, 58–66; 1978) presented the question after the stimulus word while we presented the question before the word. For ninth-grade students, the question after condition resulted in an attenuation of the recall difference between semantic and acoustic questions compared to the question before condition. It was argued that the pattern of developmental differences in incidental memory that is obtained may be related to which procedure is utilized.     

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.     

Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with unknown objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the only difference between both objects was their relative novelty to the participant or whether, in addition, participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker referred to. We tested participants’ immediate referent selection and their retention after 5 min. Results revealed that when given common ground information both age groups inferred the correct referent with high success and enhanced behavioral certainty. Without this information, object novelty alone did not guide their selection. After 5 min, adults remembered their previous selections above chance in both conditions, while children only showed reliable learning in the pragmatic condition. The pattern of results indicates how pragmatics may aid referent disambiguation and learning in both adults and young children. From early ontogeny on, children's social-cognitive understanding may guide their communicative interactions and support their language acquisition.

Research Highlights

• We tested how 2-3-year-olds and adults resolve referential ambiguity without any lexical cues.
• In the pragmatic context both age groups disambiguated novel word-object-mappings, while object novelty alone did not guide their referent selection.
• In the pragmatic context, children also showed increased certainty in disambiguation and retained new word-object-mappings over time.
• These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on whether children learn words on the basis of domain-specific constraints, lower-level associative mechanisms, or pragmatic inferences.

     

Conditions under which thurstone case III representations for binary choice probabilities are also Fechnerian

By a Thurstone Case III representation for binary symmetric choice probabilities P_x,y we mean that there exist functions F, μ, σ > 0 such that $\text{P}{}_{\mathrm{x,y}}\text{= F[}\text{(μ(x) ? μ(y))}\text{(σ}{}^2\text{(x) + σ}{}^2\text{(y))}{}^{\mathrm{<mtext>1</mtext><mtext>2</mtext>}}\text{]}$. We show that the constraint σ = constant, or μ = ασ + β, α ≠ 0, is both necessary and sufficient for a Thurstone Case III representation to be Fechnerian, i.e., to be reexpressable as as P_x,y = G(u(x) ? u(y)) for some suitably chosen functions G, u.     

Perceptual centres for Dutch digits

In two experiments, analogous to those reported by Marcus (1976) with English words and subjects, we determined the psychological moment of occurrence (p-centre) of Dutch digit names. In the first experiment we determined the p-centres for the digits 1 through 10 and compared the empirical results with values calculated from the formula that Marcus defines over the acoustic characteristics of stimulus words. We found good agreement between empirical and predicted values. In a second experiment we studied the effect of cycle time and repeated measurement on perceptual centres. The results confirm the independence of the p-centre phenomenon from practice and periodicity. A comparison of ‘identical’ and ‘non-identical’ stimulus pairs shows that larger variances are associated with the former condition.     

Understanding of others’ knowledge in French and Japanese children: A comparative study with a disambiguation task on 16–38-month-olds

In order to explain the cultural differences reported in the results of false-belief tasks, we attempted to verify the ‘task bias hypothesis’ suggested by certain studies (e.g. Tardif et al. (2004). Journal of Child Language, 31, 779–800; Rubio-Fernandez & Geurts (2013). Psychological Science, 24(1), 27–33. doi 10.1177/0956797612447819). At the same time, we aimed to observe the theory of mind (ToM) ability of infants and young children under the age of three in verbal communication. To this end, we propose a new protocol to test young children's ToM ability, with particular attention paid to the linguistic aspect of the task. This original disambiguation task using proper nouns (first names) was tested on a total of 32 children aged between 16 and 38 months, in France and Japan. The results revealed that after the age of 30 months children begin to correctly interpret nouns while simultaneously taking into account their partner's knowledge (50% of the French and 29% of the Japanese children were successful), whereas this remains difficult for younger children (no child under 30 months was successful). The analysis of error types has shown that ‘memory bias’ was dominant in younger children in particular and ‘association bias’ was rarely observed across all ages. Given that the results of French and Japanese children did not differ significantly, we assume that this new task design could minimise the influence of cultural difference caused by the characteristics of different languages.     

Children's comprehension of presupposed information: Logical and pragmatic inferences to speaker belief

This study explored the ability of young children (5 and 8 years old) to make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief in uttering a sentence. Presuppositional information is the information a speaker believes to be common between himself and the hearer. The information is cued by a speaker either logically, by the use of specific lexical items, or pragmatically, by the use of an utterance in violation of conventional rules of conversation. Comprehension of the information may require a reading of the context of utterance. Kindergarten and thirdgrade children and adults were read paragraphs containing both logical and pragmatic presuppositional information, as well as a sentence that could be treated in a logical or a pragmatic manner depending on the context of utterance. The results showed that both groups of children and the adults could make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief, and that the responses of the children and adults were context sensitive.     

Conditional reasoning and the competence-performance issue: A developmental analysis of a training task

Empirical investigations of conditional reasoning have generally found that both children and young adults perform poorly on tasks that require the selection or evaluation of those propositions that test the truth status of conditional statements (if p then q). Earlier work (D. O'Brien & W. F. Overton, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1980, 30, 44–60) suggested that poor performances with these tasks by young adults show improvement following the introduction of evidence that contradicts earlier faulty inferences, and this improvement generalizes to other conditional reasoning tasks. The effects of the contradiction training were not found with younger subjects. The present research is an extension of the contradiction training paradigm. Ten-, fourteen-, and eighteen-year-olds were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement with an evaluation and a conditional syllogism task. Significant improvement in performance was found for the twelfth grade students following the contradiction training, and this generalized across tasks. This effect was not found for the two younger groups. The usual poor performance of the oldest group is considered to be a false negative assessment of their conditional reasoning competency. Further, it is suggested that several correct performances of younger reasoners are false positive assessments of their conditional reasoning competency.     

Modulating younger and older adults’ performance in ignoring pictorial information during a word matching task

Using both behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) data, the current study sought to examine the neurophysiological underpinnings for the effect of distracting pictorial information on semantic word matching performance in younger and older adults. This was tested in the context of semantic relations between task-relevant word pairs, a task-irrelevant picture and the resultant N400 differences in ERP. Younger and older adults were shown a context word superimposed on a to-be-ignored picture, followed by a test word. Their task was to determine whether the prime and test words were semantically related. The to-be-ignored pictures were interfering (for ‘No’ trials), facilitating (for ‘Yes’ trials), or neutral (for both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ trials) to the expected responses. The interfering and facilitatory effects of to-be-ignored pictures were assessed under more automatic and more controlled conditions by manipulating the context–test interstimulus-interval (ISI) as 50 ms and 1000 ms, respectively. The analysis of the N400 at centro-parietal sites during test word display revealed similar N400 amplitudes for the ‘No’ response trials at the two ISIs, suggesting that younger and older adults showed an equivalent effect from interfering pictures. In contrast, younger adults showed greater reductions in the N400, as compared to older adults, for ‘Yes’ trials indicating differential effects in facilitation from to-be-ignored pictorial information, but only in the long ISI condition. The data are discussed in terms of age differences in resource demanding strategy use during a semantic word matching task, specifically during controlled retrieval.     

Longitudinal Relations Between Parent–Child Conflict and Children’s Adjustment: The Role of Children’s Sleep

Sleep was examined as a process variable in relations between verbal and physical parent–child conflict and change in children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms over time. Participants were 282 children at T1 (M age?=?9.44 years; 48 % girls), 280 children at T2 (M age?=?10.41 years), and 275 children at T3 (M age?=?11.35 years). Children reported on parent–child conflict, sleep was assessed with actigraphy, and parents reported on children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Autoregressive effects for sleep and internalizing and externalizing symptoms were controlled to examine change over time. Supportive of intervening processes, physical parent–child conflict at T1 and increased change in internalizing and externalizing symptoms at T3 were indirectly related through their shared association with reduced sleep continuity (efficiency, long wake episodes) at T2. Findings build on a small but growing literature and highlight the importance of considering the role of sleep in relations between family conflict and child development.     

Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study

English and Italian provide some interesting contrasts that are relevant to a controversial problem in psycholinguistics: the boundary between grammatical and extra-grammatical knowledge in sentence processing. Although both are SVO word order languages without case inflections to indicate basic grammatical relations, Italian permits far more variation in word order for pragmatic purposes. Hence Italians must rely more than English listeners on factors other than word order. In this experiment, Italian and English adults were asked to interpret 81 simple sentences varying word order, animacy contrasts between the two nouns, topicalization and contrastive stress. Italians relied primarily on semantic strategies while the English listeners relied on word order—including a tendency to interpret the second noun as subject in non-canonical word orders (corresponding to word order variations in informal English production). Italians also made greater use of topic and stress information. Finally, Italians were much slower and less consistent in the application of word order strategies even for reversible NVN sentences where there was no conflict between order and semantics. This suggests that Italian is ‘less’ of an SVO language than English. Semantic strategies apparently stand at the ‘core’ of Italian to the same extent that word order stands at the ‘core’ of English. It is suggested that these results pose problems for claims about a ‘universal’ separation between semantics and syntax, and for theories that postulate a ‘universal’ priority of one type of information over another. Results are discussed in the light of the competition model, a functionalist approach to grammar that accounts in a principled way for probabilistic outcomes and differential ‘weights’ among competing and converging sources of information in sentence processing.     

Adjective Semantics, World Knowledge and Visual Context: Comprehension of Size Terms by 2- to 7-Year-Old Dutch-Speaking Children

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ by 2- to 7-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. 2- and 3-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although 7-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like.