Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types

Four experiments conducted in French were performed to investigate the role of grammatical congruency and vocabulary class on lexical decision times. In Experiment 1, using a double lexical decision, slower reaction times were found for pairs of words that disagreed in gender or number than for congruent pairs. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 tested this effect with a standard priming procedure. The grammatical congruency effect varied according to presentation times (130, 150, or 500 msec) and to vocabulary class of context word (closed or open). Closed-class context words induced stronger grammatical effect than did open-class words. These results suggest that the grammatical link existing between the two words of a pair is more immediately computed when the first one is a closed-class item and argue for a distinct computational role of open- and closed-class words in sentence processing.     

Relationship between intelligence and vocabulary

This study explored the correlations of scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III in screening language problems and scores on the three Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test subscales. Participants were 243 students ages 6 to 17 years in Grades K-11 who were identified as learning disabled, learning disabled with speech impairment, mentally retarded, and speech impaired. Analysis indicated strong correlations between the two measures, particularly between the CREVT General Vocabulary and WISC-III Verbal IQ (r = .80), WISC-III Verbal Comprehension Index (r =.83), and the Vocabulary subtest (r =.76). These results held across the grades. Supporting earlier studies of relationships of Verbal IQ and Receptive Vocabulary, correlations were lower between participants in Grades K through 2 than those in higher grades on the WISC-III Verbal IQ and the Receptive Vocabulary subtest. An analysis of the accuracy of the WISC-III for classifying students with language problems indicated improvement in classification over chance. These findings suggest that the WISC-III may be an effective screen for language problems.     

Reexamining the vocabulary spurt

The authors asked whether there is evidence to support the existence of the vocabulary spurt, an increase in the rate of word learning that is thought to occur during the 2nd year of life. Using longitudinal data from 38 children, they modeled the rate of word learning with two functions, one with an inflection point (logistic), which would indicate a spurt, and one without an inflection point (quadratic). Comparing the fits of these two functions using likelihood ratios, they found that just 5 children had a better logistic fit, which indicated that these children underwent a spurt. The implications for theories of cognitive and language development are considered.     

Aging and vocabulary scores: a meta-analysis

Vocabulary scores were examined in a total of 210 articles, containing 324 independent pairings of younger and older adults, from the 1986-2001 issues of Psychology and Aging. The average effect size, favoring the old, was 0.80 SD. Production tests yielded smaller effects (0.68 SD) than multiple-choice tests (0.93 SD). Both age and education were found to be partially independent determinants of performance in production tests; age effects disappeared in multiple-choice tests as soon as education was taken into account. In addition, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Revised Vocabulary subtest (D. Wechsler, 1981) was also found to be sensitive to the Flynn effect (J. R. Flynn, 1987; i.e., increasing test scores with advancing birth year). The results question the approach of using age-group equality in vocabulary scores as a check on sample equivalence.     

Human simulations of vocabulary learning

The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental "learners" are adults. The items to be "acquired" in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs from a sample of maternal speech to 18-24-month-old infants. The various experiments ask about the kinds of information that will support identification of these words as they occur in mother-to-child discourse. Both the proportion correctly identified and the type of word that is identifiable changes significantly as a function of information type. We discuss these results as consistent with the incremental construction of a highly lexicalized grammar by cognitively and pragmatically sophisticated human infants, but inconsistent with a procedure in which lexical acquisition is independent of and antecedent to syntax acquisition.     

Bilingual vocabulary size and lexical reading in Italian

In the present study we investigated how the vocabulary size of English–Italian bilinguals affects reading aloud in Italian (L2) modulating the reader's sensitivity to lexical aspects of the language. We divided adult bilinguals in two groups according to their vocabulary size (Larger — LV, and smaller — SV), and compared their naming performance to that of native Italian (NI) readers. In Experiment 1 we investigated the lexicality and word frequency effects in reading aloud. Similarly to NI, both groups of bilinguals showed these effects. In Experiment 2 we investigated stress assignment – which is not predictable by rule – to Italian words. The SV group made more stress errors in reading words with a non-dominant stress pattern compared to the LV group. The results suggest that the size of the reader's L2 lexicon affects the probability of correct reading aloud.     

Emotional expression and vocabulary learning in adults and children

A great deal of what we know about the world has not been learned via first-hand observation but thanks to others' testimony. A crucial issue is to know which kind of cues people use to evaluate information provided by others. In this context, recent studies in adults and children underline that informants' facial expressions could play an essential role. To test the importance of the other's emotions in vocabulary learning, we used two avatars expressing happiness, anger or neutral emotions when proposing different verbal labels for an unknown object. Experiment 1 revealed that adult participants were significantly more likely than chance to choose the label suggested by the avatar displaying a happy face over the label suggested by the avatar displaying an angry face. Experiment 2 extended these results by showing that both adults and children as young as 3 years old showed this effect. These data suggest that decision making concerning newly acquired information depends on informant's expressions of emotions, a finding that is consistent with the idea that behavioural intents have facial signatures that can be used to detect another's intention to cooperate.     

Listening for schwa in academic vocabulary

The schwa sound, as the most frequent in English, is a near constant in words of three syllables or longer in academic texts. As linguistic research has shown, it characteristically recurs in rhythmic alternation with stressed syllables, contributing to a word's distinctive sound shape. The location of strong stress and therefore schwa is often determined by the identity of derivational suffixes. Listening for schwa offers insight into reading and spelling long words, developing phonological and morphological sensitivity, weighing appropriate instruction, and recognizing the complexities of acquiring English multisyllabic words for literate engagement.     

Early vocabulary inventory for Mandarin Chinese

Early vocabulary development is a reliable predictor of children's later language skills. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) has provided a powerful tool to assess earlyvocabulary development in English and other languages. However, there have been no published CDI norms for Mandarin Chinese. Given the importance of large-scale comparative data sets for understanding the early childhood lexicon, we have developed an early vocabulary inventory for Mandarin. In this article, we report our efforts in developing this instrument, and discuss the data collected from 884 Chinese families in Beijing over a period of 12-30 months, based on our instrument. Chinese children's receptive and expressive lexicons as assessed by our inventory match well with those reported for English on the basis of CDI. In particular, our data indicate comprehension-production differences, individual differences in early comprehension and in later production, and different lexical development profiles among infants versus toddlers. We also make the checklists and norms of our inventory available to the research community via the Internet; they may be accessed from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8–9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword–picture matching posttest was used to assess learning of nonword meaning, and a spelling posttest was used to assess learning of nonword orthography. Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography. Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword–referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in posttests was related to children's reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.     

Language transfer and blocking in second language vocabulary learning

The influence of different vocabulary instructional techniques upon the acquisition of different language words was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, comparisons were made between the learning of Chinese and French words employing both paired-associate presentations and spacing procedures. The results supported the view that language transfer affects the acquisition of second language words, with more French words being learned than Chinese words. The superiority of the spacing procedure over the paired-associate presentation found in these results suggested that the spacing method diminished the adverse effects of blocking and thus enhanced learning. However, no significant interaction between the teaching procedures and different language words was detected. That is, under the spacing procedure, greater improvement in learning of Chinese words was not found. The experiment was thus modified by substituting the spacing procedure with aural feedback in Experiment 2. In this experiment, a significant interaction between these two factors was detected. That is, the recall for French was more than Chinese in the paired-associate condition, however, under the aural feedback, performance in Chinese was statistically equivalent to that in French. Hence, these findings may contradict the prediction of language transfer. It appears that the phenomenon of language transfer may be far less important in vocabulary learning than the use of a method of instruction which neutralises the negative effects of blocking.     

Eye movements,word familiarity,and vocabulary acquisition

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

Physical aggression and expressive vocabulary in 19-month-old twins

In the prevention of physical aggression, possible etiological links with language development are rarely taken into account. Indeed, little is known about when language and aggressive behavior become linked during development and which mechanisms are responsible for this association. This study investigated the association between physical aggression and language in late infancy with a genetic design that involved 562 19-month-old twins. A modest but significant correlation (r = -.20) was found between physical aggression and expressive vocabulary. Substantial heritability was found for physical aggression. Quantitative genetic modeling suggests that the correlation between expressive vocabulary and physical aggression cannot be explained by shared etiologies. However, phenotype-to-phenotype models indicate that the covariation can be entirely accounted for by a significant phenotypic path from expressive vocabulary to physical aggression. The implications of these results for early prevention of chronic physical aggression are discussed.     

Statistical clustering and the contents of the infant vocabulary

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words, rather than missegmentations. In English and Dutch, these word-forms exhibit the strong-weak (trochaic) pattern that guides lexical segmentation after 8 months, suggesting that the trochaic parsing bias is learned as a generalization from statistically extracted bisyllables, and not via attention to short utterances or to high-frequency bisyllables. Extracted word-forms come from various syntactic classes, and exhibit distributional characteristics enabling rudimentary sorting of words into syntactic categories. The results highlight the importance of infants' first year in language learning: though they may know the meanings of very few words, infants are well on their way to building a vocabulary.     

Age of acquisition effects in vocabulary learning

Two experiments examined whether the age of acquisition (AoA) of a concept influences the speed at which native English speakers are able to name pictures using a newly acquired second language (L2) vocabulary. In Experiment 1, participants were taught L2 words associated with pictures. In Experiment 2 a second group of participants were taught the same words associated with L1 translations. Following training both groups performed a picture naming task in which they were asked to name pictures using the newly acquired words. Significant AoA effects were observed only in Experiment 1, in that participants were faster at naming pictures representing early acquired relative to late acquired concepts. The results suggest that the AoA of a concept can exert influence over processing which is independent of the AoA of the word form. The results also indicate that different training methods may lead to qualitative differences in the nature of the links formed between words and concepts during the earliest stages of second language learning.