Learning to represent word meaning: What initial training events reveal about children's developing action verb concepts

Very little experimental research has shown how the events from which verbs are learned affect children's representation of meaning. This study addressed these lacunae by systematically exploring how three different initial training contexts affect children's and adults' interpretation of novel action verbs. Brief, videotaped action events were used to teach children and adults novel verbs in 1 of 3 conditions. Subjects were asked whether these verbs generalized to other events differing only in outcome, manner, instrument, or agent. Initial representation of verb meaning was inferred from generalizations. Unlike 10-year-olds and adults, 3-year-olds' interpretations were (a) significantly context specific—preferring instrument and outcome elements of meaning in one context, but manner in another, and (b) consistently, though moderately biased to favor the manner of action. Results clearly demonstrate that both the young word learner and the context in which word learning occurs are equally important determinants of developing action verb concepts.     

Learning of letter names and sounds and their contribution to word recognition

This study investigated knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, their learning, and their contributions to word recognition. Of 123 preschoolers examined on letter knowledge, 65 underwent training on both letter names and letter sounds in a counterbalanced order. Prior to training, children were more advanced in associating letters with their names than with their sounds and could provide the sound of a letter only if they could name it. However, children learned more easily to associate letters with sounds than with names. Training just on names improved performance on sounds, but the sounds produced were extended (CV) rather than phonemic. Learning sounds facilitated later learning of the same letters' names, but not vice versa. Training either on names or on sounds improved word recognition and explanation of printed words. Results are discussed with reference to cognitive and societal factors affecting letter knowledge acquisition, features of the Hebrew alphabet and orthography, and educational implications.     

Acquiring new word meaning: What does it tell us about development

R. J. Sternberg (1984, Developmental Review, 4, 113–138) offers a thoughtful and provocative essay on how individuals acquire meanings for novel or unfamiliar nouns. The Sternberg essay, however, is incomplete on a number of grounds. By stressing general processes and specific knowledge as critical components in the acquisition of verbal concepts, for example, it overlooks two logically complementary categories—specific processes and general knowledge—and the role these play in the acquisitions in question. A second concern is that the paper blurs distinctions among development, short-term learning, and the origin/acquisition of individual differences. Finally, Sternberg is encouraged to frame the specific phenomenon described here within the context of a larger theory of intellectual development and to indicate what else this specific model can be used to explain.     

Early word meanings: The case of object names

It has been claimed that young children use object names overgenerally and undergenerally because they do not have notions of objects of particular kinds, but rather, complexive notions of objects and their habitual actions or locations. However, for overgeneral uses in particular, it is difficult to differentiate word meaning from word use because communicative functions are not explicitly expressed in single-word speech. In the present paper, we identify three types of overgeneral uses, and argue that two of these reflect communicative functions rather than complexive meanings. We obtained production data from 10 children in the single-word period, using a standardized method of recording utterance contexts. Most uses of object names were for appropriate instances of the adult categories. Of the overgeneral uses, most were attributable to communicative functions rather than complexive meanings, and there was no evidence of undergeneral use. The results provide strong evidence that, from the very start, children's object names, like those of adults, apply to objects of particular kinds.     

Strategies for learning proper names: expanding retrieval practice,meaning and imagery

Name learning strategies including retrieval practice, semantic associations and imagery were compared in laboratory‐based and real‐life experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 studied expanding retrieval practice and a semantic association strategy as memory improvement techniques for learning proper names. Participants either retrieved or restudied names on the same, expanding schedule. After a short, filled interval, cued recall of names was about 250% better following retrieval than restudy and 200% better with than without semantic associations. Together, the techniques improved recall by 300–400%. In Experiment 3, retrieval practice was compared with an imagery mnemonic for name learning under real‐life social conditions: Participants sought to learn the names of people they met at a party. Retrieval practice produced 50% higher recall after 24–72 hours but the imagery mnemonic was no more effective than non‐directed instructions to learn names. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Communicating emotion: linking affective prosody and word meaning

The present study investigated the role of emotional tone of voice in the perception of spoken words. Listeners were presented with words that had either a happy, sad, or neutral meaning. Each word was spoken in a tone of voice (happy, sad, or neutral) that was congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to affective meaning, and naming latencies were collected. Across experiments, tone of voice was either blocked or mixed with respect to emotional meaning. The results suggest that emotional tone of voice facilitated linguistic processing of emotional words in an emotion-congruent fashion. These findings suggest that information about emotional tone is used in the processing of linguistic content influencing the recognition and naming of spoken words in an emotion-congruent manner.     

Recency effects for meaning and form in word selection

Three experiments examined the contribution of phonological availability in selecting words as predicted by interactive activation models of word production. Homophonous words such as week and weak permitted a word's phonological form to be activated on priming trials without selection of its meaning or lemma. Recent production of a homophone failed to significantly increase production of its twin as a sentence completion. However, speakers were significantly more likely to complete a sentence with a recently read or generated unambiguous word. This increase in response probability was unaffected by word frequency. The results constrain the degree to which experience and phonological availability may affect word selection in spoken language production.     

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker’s linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1–3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of “bonnet”) in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker’s dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and American-accented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access.     

Abstract noun classification: using a neural network to match word context and word meaning

Psychologists have used artificial neural networks for a few decades to simulate perception, language acquisition, and other cognitive processes. This paper discusses the use of artificial neural networks in research on semantics—in particular, in the investigation of abstract noun meanings. It is widely acknowledged that a word’s meaning varies with its contexts of use, but it is a complex task to identify which context elements are relevant to a word’s meaning. The present study illustrates how connectionist networks can be used to examine this problem. A simple feedforward network learned to distinguish among six abstract nouns, on the basis of characteristics of their contexts, in a corpus of randomly selected naturalistic sentences.     

Learning about sounds contributes to learning about words: Effects of prosody and phonotactics on infant word learning

This research investigates how early learning about native language sound structure affects how infants associate sounds with meanings during word learning. Infants (19-month-olds) were presented with bisyllabic labels with high or low phonotactic probability (i.e., sequences of frequent or infrequent phonemes in English). The labels were produced with the predominant English trochaic (strong/weak) stress pattern or the less common iambic (weak/strong) pattern. Using the habituation-based Switch Task to test label learning, we found that infants readily learned high probability trochaic labels. However, they failed to learn low probability labels, regardless of stress, and failed to learn iambic labels, regardless of phonotactics. Thus, infants required support from both common phoneme sequences and a common stress pattern to map the labels to objects. These findings demonstrate that early word learning is shaped by prior knowledge of native language phonological regularities and provide support for the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.     

The use of category and similarity information in limiting hypotheses

Memory &; Cognition - Previous studies have shown that adults usually select diverse evidence for generalizing hypotheses. We investigated what kind of evidence people select in another type of...     

Visual recognition thresholds and dimensions of word meaning

Tachistoscopic recognition thresholds were obtained for nouns with high or low values on one dimension of meaning while two others were controlled. Frequency, imagery concreteness (I), and meaningfulness (m), were varied in different lists in one experiment, frequency and m in a second, and m alone in a third. Ratings of familiarity were also obtained to supplement frequency as a measure of familiarity. The results showed that ease of visual recognition was most strongly related to frequency and familiarity. Imagery was unrelated to thresholds when familiarity and m were controlled. Meaningfulness showed a small but consistent positive relation to ease of recognition even with the other variables held constant. Except for the puzzling effect of m, the results are consistent with the view that perceptual recognition is primarily dependent upon the familiarity of the target stimulus and not upon associative processes evoked by it.     

Russian-language neurosemantics: Clustering of word meaning and sense from oral narratives

This article is a part of a large-scale brain mapping project aimed at finding the relations among semantic categories in oral Russian-language texts and brain activity as measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goal of present study in particular is to examine the nature of lexical semantic relations and find an appropriate lexical space, homeomorphic to the activation patterns in the brain. Participants were presented with oral narratives, which described significant social issues from the first-person perspective. Stimuli were annotated using a dictionary and a vector approach. Results show that fMRI signal and clusters of related words have similar patterns of brain activation across participants. Results also show that annotation by a list of features more strongly contributes to prediction of the observed activation patterns. Findings confirm the hypothesis of situational semantic representation in the brain.     

Dissociating language and word meaning in the bilingual brain

How do bilingual (or multilingual) persons keep different languages apart and switch between them as needs arise? Crinion et al. have used an ingenious method to dissociate brain regions sensitive to word meaning from those sensitive to the combination of meaning and language. This work should stimulate further research examining the role of subcortical areas in language processing and in context-appropriate language production.     

The power of the written word: Comparing word meaning inferencing from auditory and written modalities throughout grade school

Previous research indicates that word learning from auditory contexts may be more effective than written context at least through fourth grade. However, no study has examined contextual differences in word learning in older school-aged children when reading abilities are more developed. Here we examined developmental differences in children’s ability to deduce the meanings of unknown words from the surrounding linguistic context in the auditory and written modalities and sought to identify the most important predictors of success in each modality. A total of 89 children aged 8–15 years were randomly assigned to either read or listen to a narrative that included eight novel words, with five exposures to each novel word. They then completed three posttests to assess word meaning inferencing. Children across all ages performed better in the written modality. Vocabulary was the only significant predictor of success on the word inferencing task. Results indicate support for written stimuli as the most effective modality for novel word meaning deduction. Our findings suggest that the presence of orthographic information facilitates novel word learning even for early, less proficient readers.     

Cerebral hemispheric mechanisms linking ambiguous word meaning retrieval and creativity

The deferral of ambiguity resolution has been thought to be an important component of creativity. The time course of priming of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words was investigated using a divided visual field priming paradigm with subjects that varied on a measure of creativity. The Wallach-Kogan similarities subtest was used to group 72 subjects into three levels of verbal creativity to compare their performance on the ambiguity resolution task (Burgess & Simpson, 1988a). Results suggest that both the left and right hemispheres contribute to the maintenance of multiple word meanings in highly creative subjects, while less creative subjects show sustained subordinate priming only in the right hemisphere or no sustained subordinate priming. These results support an interactive, collaborative theory of verbal creativity (Bogen & Bogen, 1969) and suggest that there are important individual differences that expand on the basic time course model of hemispheric processing (Burgess & Simpson, 1988a).