Relationships between language structure and language learning: the suffixing preference and grammatical categorization

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world's languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child-directed speech in English found that suffixes were more accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms.     

Sublexical and Lexical Influences on Gender Assignment in French

Two experiments showed that French native speakers rely on sublexical and lexical cues to allocate gender during word recognition. Sublexical cues were based on whether the word ending was typical for a particular gender rather than neutral with regard to gender. Lexical cues were based on whether the associated definite article was informative (for words beginning with a consonant) or uninformative (for words beginning with a vowel). Classification of single nouns and verification of grammatical combinations of indefinite article and noun led to longer times when both sublexical and lexical cues were uninformative compared with when one or both cues were informative. Verification of ungrammatical combinations of indefinite article and noun yielded separate effects of both cues, though only when monitoring for both semantic and syntactic unacceptability in meaningful phrases did people attend to both cues independently. It was argued that people became more cautious in their gender assignments as task requirements became deeper. If strategic changes as a function of task demands are incorporated, the results are compatible with connectionist models proposing that gender decisions are computed from strength of past associations of the word and gender-specifying elements.     

Gender attribution and gender agreement in 4- to 10-year-old French children

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, i.e., how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are put to use to solve attribution problems and contrast it with a simple “masculine as default” strategy. Elicited production data from three experiments, involving 312 4–10-year-old French children and 40 adult controls, were found compatible with this latter scenario and to provide only scant support for the former one. Second, we argue that previous studies have overestimated French children's gender agreement abilities, and that French children's ability to make the article and the adjective agree can be assumed from age 7 onwards, but not before.     

Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French

This study examines French-learning infants’ sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent ‘the boy(s) read(s)’) where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.     

The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation

Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of phonological and distributional cues has not, with very few exceptions, been empirically assessed. This paper presents a series of analyses of phonological cues and distributional cues and their potential for distinguishing grammatical categories of words in corpus analyses. The corpus analyses indicated that phonological cues were more reliable for less frequent words, whereas distributional information was most valuable for high frequency words. We tested this prediction in an artificial language learning experiment, where the distributional and phonological cues of categories of nonsense words were varied. The results corroborated the corpus analyses. For high-frequency nonwords, distributional information was more useful, whereas for low-frequency words there was more reliance on phonological cues. The results indicate that phonological and distributional cues contribute differentially towards grammatical categorisation.     

"Frequent frames" in German child-directed speech: a limited cue to grammatical categories

Mintz (2003) found that in English child-directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A_x_B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfully extended to French (Chemla, Mintz, Bernal, & Christophe, 2009). In this paper, we show that, as for Dutch (Erkelens, 2009), frequent frames in German do not enable such accurate lexical categorization. This can be explained by the characteristics of German including a less restricted word order compared to English or French and the frequent use of some forms as both determiner and pronoun in colloquial German. Finally, we explore the relationship between the accuracy of frames and their potential utility and find that even some of those frames showing high token-based accuracy are of limited value because they are in fact set phrases with little or no variability in the slot position.     

The relation between children's conceptual functioning with color and color term acquisition

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was tested in two experiments using samples of 25- to 39-month-olds and 20- to 32-month-olds. Children's ability to conceptually represent color and their knowledge of color terms were assessed, and a strong association was found between the ability to make inferences based on color and the comprehension of color words. Children who did not comprehend color terms were unsuccessful at a conceptual task that required them to represent color as a property independent of the particular objects that displayed it. The results suggest that the initial absence of an abstract representation of color contributes to the difficulty that young children encounter when first learning color words.     

Cross-linguistic relations between quantifiers and numerals in language acquisition: Evidence from Japanese

A study of 104 Japanese-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds tested the relation between numeral and quantifier acquisition. A first study assessed Japanese children’s comprehension of quantifiers, numerals, and classifiers. Relative to English-speaking counterparts, Japanese children were delayed in numeral comprehension at 2 years of age but showed no difference at 3 and 4 years of age. Also, Japanese 2-year-olds had better comprehension of quantifiers, indicating that their delay was specific to numerals. A second study examined the speech of Japanese and English caregivers to explore the syntactic cues that might affect integer acquisition. Quantifiers and numerals occurred in similar syntactic positions and overlapped to a greater degree in English than in Japanese. Also, Japanese nouns were often dropped, and both quantifiers and numerals exhibited variable positions relative to the nouns they modified. We conclude that syntactic cues in English facilitate bootstrapping numeral meanings from quantifier meanings and that such cues are weaker in classifier languages such as Japanese.     

The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition

Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.     

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.     

Grammatical language impairment and the specificity of cognitive domains: relations between auditory and language abilities

Grammatical-specific language impairment (G-SLI) in children, arguably, provides evidence for the existence of a specialised grammatical sub-system in the brain, necessary for normal language development. Some researchers challenge this, claiming that domain-general, low-level auditory deficits, particular to rapid processing, cause phonological deficits and thereby SLI. We investigate this possibility by testing the auditory discrimination abilities of G-SLI children for speech and non-speech sounds, at varying presentation rates, and controlling for the effects of age and language on performance. For non-speech formant transitions, 69% of the G-SLI children showed normal auditory processing, whereas for the same acoustic information in speech, only 31% did so. For rapidly presented tones, 46% of the G-SLI children performed normally. Auditory performance with speech and non-speech sounds differentiated the G-SLI children from their age-matched controls, whereas speed of processing did not. The G-SLI children evinced no relationship between their auditory and phonological/grammatical abilities. We found no consistent evidence that a deficit in processing rapid acoustic information causes or maintains G-SLI. The findings, from at least those G-SLI children who do not exhibit any auditory deficits, provide further evidence supporting the existence of a primary domain-specific deficit underlying G-SLI.     

Pronoun resolution in Italian: The role of grammatical gender and context

The aim of this self-paced reading study was to investigate the role of grammatical and context-based gender in assigning an antecedent to a pronoun where the antecedent is an epicene or a bigender noun. In Italian, epicene nouns (e.g., vittima, victim) have grammatical gender, whereas bigender nouns (e.g., assistente, assistant) do not have grammatical gender but instead acquire it from the context in which they occur. We devised three different types of context: incongruent contexts (i.e., contexts containing a gender bias that differed from the grammatical gender of the epicene), congruent contexts (i.e., contexts where the gender bias and grammatical gender coincided), and neutral contexts. In the case of epicenes, pronoun resolution was driven by grammatical gender; in the case of bigenders it was driven by the gender assigned by context. The results are discussed in the light of current models of anaphor resolution.     

Age of acquisition effects on the functional organization of language in the adult brain

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants’ age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and did not vary in relation to age of acquisition. For both tasks, a more left lateralized pattern of activation was observed, with activity for grammatical judgment being more anterior than that observed for phonemic-hand judgment, which was more posterior by comparison. Age of acquisition was linearly and negatively related to activation levels in anterior language regions and positively related to activation levels in posterior visual regions for both tasks.     

The role of perception, language, and preference in the developmental acquisition of basic color terms

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization. Experimental tasks were designed to measure different aspects of perceptual color processing (discrimination and saliency), color preference and objective counts of color term frequency in preschool-directed language (books and mothers' speech) were used to compare the acquisition of three groups of colors: primary colors, secondary colors (orange, pink, and purple) that appear at the same time as the primary colors, and secondary colors (brown and gray) that appear late. Although our results suggest that perception does not directly shape young children's color term acquisition, we found that children prefer brown and gray significantly less than basic colors and that these color terms appear significantly less often in child-directed speech, suggesting that color preference, linguistic input, and developing color cognition may be linked.     

Rhythmic alternation and the optional complementiser in English: new evidence of phonological influence on grammatical encoding

In a recall-based spoken production experiment, native English-speaking participants' variable use of the complementiser that to introduce the sentential complement in sentences like Henry knew (that) Lucy/Louise washed the dishes was found to be related to whether that inclusion/omission resulted in an alternating sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables between the verb of the main clause and the subject of the complement clause. This finding is discussed in relation to the question of whether and how phonological encoding can influence grammatical encoding in spoken language production.     

7～9岁儿童失言理解与执行功能的关系

为了说明学龄儿童心理理论与执行功能的关系,研究采用失言理解、威斯康星卡片分类和汉诺塔任务分别考察了90名7—9岁儿童的心理理论和执行功能。结果表明,失言理解与抑制-转换能力相关显著（r=0．34,P〈0．01）,但是与计划能力相关不显著（r=0．06,P〉0．05）。在控制年龄后,失言理解与抑制-转换能力的相关仍然显著（r=0．29,P〈0．05）。研究结果说明,学龄儿童心理理论与执行功能的相关模式与学龄前儿童完全一致,提示心理理论与执行功能的相关关系从学龄前延续到了学龄阶段。     

Bias for consonantal information over vocalic information in 30-month-olds: cross-linguistic evidence from French and English

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at the lexical level. In the current study using the same task, we first show that by 30 months French-learning infants can make use of one-feature vocalic contrasts (e.g., /pize/–/pyze/). Second, we show that in a situation where infants must neglect either a consonantal one-feature change or a vocalic one-feature change (e.g., match a /pide/ with either a /tide/ or a /pyde/), both French- and English-learning 30-month-olds choose to neglect the vocalic change rather than the consonantal change. We argue that these results suggest that by 30 months of age, infants still give less weight to vocalic information than to consonantal information in a lexically related task even though they are able to process fine vocalic information.     

Use of phonetic specificity during the acquisition of new words: differences between consonants and vowels

The present study explores the issue of the use of phonetic specificity in the process of learning new words at 20 months of age. The procedure used follows Nazzi and Gopnik [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2001). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: When does language become a tool for categorization? Cognition, 80, B11-B20]. Infants were first presented with triads of perceptually dissimilar objects, which were given made-up names, two of the objects receiving the same name. Then, word learning was evaluated through object selection/categorization. Tests involved phonetically different words (e.g. [pize] vs. [mora], Experiment 1), words differing minimally on their onset consonant (e.g. [pize] vs. [tize], Experiment 2a), and conditions which had never been tested before: non-initial consonantal contrasts (e.g. [pide] vs. [pige], Experiment 2b), and vocalic contrasts (e.g. [pize] vs. [pyze]; [pize] vs. [paze]; [pize] vs. [pizu], Experiments 3a-c). Results differed across conditions: words could be easily learnt in the phonetically different condition, and were learnt, though to a lesser degree, in both the initial and non-initial minimal consonant contrast; however, infants' global performance on all three vocalic contrasts was at chance level. The present results shed new light regarding the specificity of early words, and raise the possibility of different contributions for vowels and consonants in early word learning.