Children's Use of Generics in Inductive Inferences

Online comprehension of naturally spoken and perceptually degraded words was assessed in 95 children ages 12 to 31 months. The time course of word recognition was measured by monitoring eye movements as children looked at pictures while listening to familiar target words presented in unaltered, time-compressed, and low-pass-filtered forms. Success in word recognition varied with age and level of vocabulary development, and with the perceptual integrity of the word. Recognition was best overall for unaltered words, lower for time-compressed words, and significantly lower in low-pass-filtered words. Reaction times were fastest in compressed, followed by unaltered and filtered words. Results showed that children were able to recognize familiar words in challenging conditions and that productive vocabulary size was more sensitive than chronological age as a predictor of children's accuracy and speed in word recognition.     

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.     

Development of Phonological Constancy: Toddlers' Perception of Native- and Jamaican-Accented Words

ABSTRACT— Efficient word recognition depends on detecting critical phonetic differences among similar-sounding words, or sensitivity to phonological distinctiveness , an ability evident at 19 months of age but unreliable at 14 to 15 months of age. However, little is known about phonological constancy , the equally crucial ability to recognize a word's identity across natural phonetic variations, such as those in cross-dialect pronunciation differences. We show that 15- and 19-month-old children recognize familiar words spoken in their native dialect, but that only the older children recognize familiar words in a dissimilar nonnative dialect, providing evidence for emergence of phonological constancy by 19 months. These results are compatible with a perceptual-attunement account of developmental change in early word recognition, but not with statistical-learning or phonological accounts. Thus, the complementary skills of phonological constancy and distinctiveness both appear at around 19 months of age, together providing the child with a fundamental insight that permits rapid vocabulary growth and later reading acquisition.     

Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children

Although children's knowledge of the sound patterns of words has been a focus of debate for many years, little is known about the lexical representations very young children use in word recognition. In particular, researchers have questioned the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical representations. The current study addressed this issue by presenting 18-23-month-olds with object labels that were either correctly pronounced, or mispronounced. Mispronunciations involved replacement of one segment with a similar segment, as in 'baby-vaby'. Children heard sentences containing these words while viewing two pictures, one of which was the referent of the sentence. Analyses of children's eye movements showed that children recognized the spoken words in both conditions, but that recognition was significantly poorer when words were mispronounced. The effects of mispronunciation on recognition were unrelated to age or to spoken vocabulary size. The results suggest that children's representations of familiar words are phonetically well-specified, and that this specification may not be a consequence of the need to differentiate similar words in production.     

图文横排促进低熟悉词汇再认:基于8岁儿童和成人证据

图文信息广泛存在于书面材料中,但是图文材料相对呈现位置和熟悉性如何交互影响信息加工效率,及其认知机制尚不清楚。本研究基于认知负荷理论框架,采用学习-再认范式,结合学习者的认知能力（注意、工作记忆、识字量等）,考察图文材料呈现位置（横排/竖排）和熟悉性（高/低）对32名儿童（7.89 ±0.30岁）和32名成人（22.67 ±3.48岁）词汇再认的影响。结果显示：（1）总体上,低熟悉性词汇在图文横排呈现时再认正确率较高,但高熟悉性词汇不受位置影响;（2）儿童对高熟悉性词汇的再认正确率较高,但成人对低熟悉性词汇的再认正确率较高;（3）儿童识字量越大,词汇再认速度越快;成人注意力、工作记忆广度、识字量成绩越高,再认正确率越高。结果表明,无论对儿童还是成人,外在负荷（呈现位置）和内在负荷（熟悉性）之间均存在交互作用,即外在负荷显著影响高内在负荷信息的加工,但对低内在负荷信息的加工影响较弱,验证了认知负荷理论。本研究成果为不同难度水平的教材排版设计和词汇识别学习提供了科学依据。     

Rapid Gains in Speed of Verbal Processing by Infants in the 2nd Year

Infants improve substantially in language ability during their 2nd year. Research on the early development of speech production shows that vocabulary begins to expand rapidly around the age of 18 months. During this period, infants also make impressive gains in understanding spoken language. We examined the time course of word recognition in infants from ages 15 to 24 months, tracking their eye movements as they looked at pictures in response to familiar spoken words. The speed and efficiency of verbal processing increased dramatically over the 2nd year. Although 15-month-old infants did not orient to the correct picture until after the target word was spoken, 24-month-olds were significantly faster, shifting their gaze to the correct picture before the end of the spoken word. By 2 years of age, children are progressing toward the highly efficient performance of adults, making decisions about words based on incomplete acoustic information.     

Consolidation of vocabulary is associated with sleep in typically developing children,but not in children with dyslexia

Sleep is known to play an active role in consolidating new vocabulary in adults; however, the mechanisms by which sleep promotes vocabulary consolidation in childhood are less well understood. Furthermore, there has been no investigation into whether previously reported differences in sleep architecture might account for variability in vocabulary consolidation in children with dyslexia. Twenty‐three children with dyslexia and 29 age‐matched typically developing peers were exposed to 16 novel spoken words. Typically developing children showed overnight improvements in novel word recall; the size of the improvement correlated positively with slow wave activity, similar to previous findings with adults. Children with dyslexia showed poorer recall of the novel words overall, but nevertheless showed overnight improvements similar to age‐matched peers. However, comparisons with younger children matched on initial levels of novel word recall pointed to reduced consolidation in dyslexics after 1 week. Crucially, there were no significant correlations between overnight consolidation and sleep parameters in the dyslexic group. This suggests a reduced role of sleep in vocabulary consolidation in dyslexia, possibly as a consequence of lower levels of learning prior to sleep, and highlights how models of sleep‐associated memory consolidation can be usefully informed by data from typical and atypical development.     

Lexical exposure and word-form encoding in 1.5-year-olds

In this study, 1.5-year-olds were taught a novel word. Some children were familiarized with the word's phonological form before learning the word's meaning. Fidelity of phonological encoding was tested in a picture-fixation task using correctly pronounced and mispronounced stimuli. Only children with additional exposure in familiarization showed reduced recognition performance given slight mispronunciations relative to correct pronunciations; children with fewer exposures did not. Mathematical modeling of vocabulary exposure indicated that children may hear thousands of words frequently enough for accurate encoding. The results provide evidence compatible with partial failure of phonological encoding at 19 months of age, demonstrate that this limitation in learning does not always hinder word recognition, and show the value of infants' word-form encoding in early lexical development.     

The Effect of Retrieval Practice in Primary School Vocabulary Learning

The testing effect refers to the finding that retrieval practice leads to better long‐term retention than additional study of course material. In the present study, we examined whether this finding generalizes to primary school vocabulary learning. We also manipulated the word learning context. Children were introduced to 20 words by listening to a story in which novel words were embedded (story condition) or by listening to isolated words (word pairs condition). The children practised the meaning of 10 words by retrieval practice and 10 words by restudy. After 1 week, they completed a cued recall test and a multiple choice test. Words learned by retrieval practice were recalled better than words learned by additional study, but there was no difference in recognition. Furthermore, the children in the word pairs condition outperformed the children in the story condition. These results show that retrieval practice may improve vocabulary learning in children. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extracting Phonological Patterns for L2 Word Learning: The Effect of Poor Phonological Awareness

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of Chinese-speaking six-grade students took a multi-trial L2 (English) word learning task after being exposed to a set of familiar words that rhymed with the target words. Children’s PA was measured at grade 3. Children with relatively poorer L1 PA and those with better L1 PA did not differ in identifying the forms of the new words. However, children with poorer L1 PA demonstrated reduced performance in naming pictures with labels that rhymed with the pre-exposure words than with labels that did not rhyme with the pre-exposure words. Children with better L1 PA were not affected by the recurring rime shared by the pre-exposure words and the target words. These findings suggest that poor L1 PA may impede L2 word learning via difficulty in abstracting phonological patterns away from L2 input to scaffold word learning.     

Learning and consolidation of new spoken words in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by rich heterogeneity in vocabulary knowledge and word knowledge that is not well accounted for by current cognitive theories. This study examines whether individual differences in vocabulary knowledge in ASD might be partly explained by a difficulty with consolidating newly learned spoken words and/or integrating them with existing knowledge. Nineteen boys with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) boys matched on age and vocabulary knowledge showed similar improvements in recognition and recall of novel words (e.g. ‘biscal’) 24 hours after training, suggesting an intact ability to consolidate explicit knowledge of new spoken word forms. TD children showed competition effects for existing neighbors (e.g. ‘biscuit’) after 24 hours, suggesting that the new words had been integrated with existing knowledge over time. In contrast, children with ASD showed immediate competition effects that were not significant after 24 hours, suggesting a qualitative difference in the time course of lexical integration. These results are considered from the perspective of the dual‐memory systems framework.     

Delayed development of phonological constancy in toddlers at family risk for dyslexia

Phonological constancy refers to infants’ ability to disregard variations in the phonetic realisation of speech sounds that do not indicate lexical contrast, e.g., when listening to accented speech. In typically-developing infants, this ability develops between 15- and 19-months of age, coinciding with the consolidation of infants’ native phonological competence and vocabulary growth. Here we investigated the developmental time course of phonological constancy in infants at family risk for developmental dyslexia, using a longitudinal design. Developmental dyslexia is a disorder affecting the acquisition of reading and spelling skills, and it also affects early auditory processing, speech perception, and lexical acquisition. Infants at-risk and not at-risk for dyslexia, based on a family history of dyslexia, participated when they were 15-, 19-, and 26-months of age. Phonological constancy was indexed by comparing at-risk and not at-risk infants’ ability to recognise familiar words in two preferential looking tasks: (1) a task using words presented in their native accent, and (2) a task using words presented in a non-native accent. We expected a delay in phonological constancy for the at-risk infants. As predicted, in the non-native accent task, not at-risk infants recognised familiar words by 19 months, but at-risk infants did not. The control infants thus exhibited phonological constancy. By 26 months, at-risk toddlers did show successful word recognition in the native accent task. However, for the non-native accent task at 26 months, neither at-risk nor control infants showed familiar word recognition. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of family risk for dyslexia on toddlers’ consolidation of early phonological and lexical skills.     

Lexical competition in young children's word learning

In two experiments, 1.5-year-olds were taught novel words whose sound patterns were phonologically similar to familiar words (novel neighbors) or were not (novel nonneighbors). Learning was tested using a picture-fixation task. In both experiments, children learned the novel nonneighbors but not the novel neighbors. In addition, exposure to the novel neighbors impaired recognition performance on familiar neighbors. Finally, children did not spontaneously use phonological differences to infer that a novel word referred to a novel object. Thus, lexical competition--inhibitory interaction among words in speech comprehension--can prevent children from using their full phonological sensitivity in judging words as novel. These results suggest that word learning in young children, as in adults, relies not only on the discrimination and identification of phonetic categories, but also on evaluating the likelihood that an utterance conveys a new word.     

Whole-word units are used before orthographic knowledge in perceptual development

A visual search task for target letters in multiletter displays was used to investigate information-processing differences between college students and presecond-grade children (mean age = 7 years, 4 months). The stimulus displays consisted of single words, pronounceable pseudowords, and unpronounceable nonwords varying in length from three to five letters. The mean response times for indicating whether or not a target letter occurred in the display increased with the number of display letters for both groups, although there were apparent differences between groups in the rate of search and type of search strategy used. Pre-second-grade children responded faster to word displays than to pseudoword and nonword displays, indicating that familiar letter strings could be processed faster than unfamiliar strings regardless of whether or not the latter were consistent with rules of English orthography. In contrast, college students processed words and pseudowords about equally well, and both resulted in faster responses than nonwords. As reading skills develop, children apparently come to process familiar words differently from other letter strings. Only after a significant sightword vocabulary is established do children seem to recognize the regularities of standard English orthography and make use of this knowledge to facilitate perceptual processes.     

Investigating the boundaries of reading units across ages and reading levels

In Experiments 1 and 2 first-, third-, and seventh-grade children and college subjects circled the letter a while reading passages constructed of words familiar to first graders. First graders made more errors on the letter a embedded in a word than on the word a, whereas the converse was true of the other age groups. In Experiments 3 and 4 first-, second-, fourth-, and seventh-grade children and college students read passages and circled the letter t, making more errors on the common word the than on other words and on correctly spelled than on misspelled words. The effect of misspelling the other words increased with age and reading skill. Our combined results suggest that reading unit size increases with age and reading ability and that, whereas younger children, like adults, unitize common words, the unitization of less common words increases as word configurations become more familiar.     

Lexical leverage: category knowledge boosts real‐time novel word recognition in 2‐year‐olds

Recent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label–object mappings in real time. We initially identified categorical domains for which individual 24‐month‐old infants have relatively higher and lower levels of knowledge, irrespective of overall vocabulary size. Next, we taught infants novel words in these higher and lower knowledge domains and then asked if their subsequent real‐time recognition of these items varied as a function of their category knowledge. While our participants successfully acquired the novel label–object mappings in our task, there were important differences in the way infants recognized these words in real time. Namely, infants showed more robust recognition of high (vs. low) domain knowledge words. These findings suggest that dense semantic structure facilitates early word learning and real‐time novel word recognition.     

The role of vocabulary ability during visual word recognition in younger and older adults

The role that vocabulary ability plays in adult age differences in word recognition was investigated. In Experiment 1, 44 older adults (ages 61-93 years) were compared with 44 younger adults (ages 18-39 years) on a standard lexical-decision task, with ambiguous words, unambiguous words, and pseudowords serving as stimuli. In Experiment 1, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R; D. Wechsler, 1981) vocabulary performance was uncontrolled across the younger and older adults, and the older adults had higher WAIS-R scores. There was no Group x Stimulus interaction. In Experiment 2, the data from the same 44 older adults were compared with data from a new sample of 44 younger adults (ages 18-44). Both groups were then matched on WAIS-R performance. Results revealed a significant Group x Stimulus interaction. Reaction time differences between the younger and older groups on the ambiguous words and unambiguous words were identical. The differences in reaction times for words and pseudowords were greater in the older adults. The importance of vocabulary ability during word recognition and lexical processing is discussed.     

Learning new vocabulary during childhood: Effects of semantic training on lexical consolidation and integration

Research suggests that word learning is an extended process, with offline consolidation crucial for the strengthening of new lexical representations and their integration with existing lexical knowledge (as measured by engagement in lexical competition). This supports a dual memory systems account, in which new information is initially sparsely encoded separately from existing knowledge and integrated with long-term memory over time. However, previous studies of this type exploited unnatural learning contexts, involving fictitious words in the absence of word meaning. In this study, 5- to 9-year-old children learned real science words (e.g., hippocampus) with or without semantic information. Children in both groups were slower to detect pauses in familiar competitor words (e.g., hippopotamus) relative to control words 24 h after training but not immediately, confirming that offline consolidation is required before new words are integrated with the lexicon and engage in lexical competition. Children recalled more new words 24 h after training than immediately (with similar improvements shown for the recall and recognition of new word meanings); however, children who were exposed to the meanings during training showed further improvements in recall after 1 week and outperformed children who were not exposed to meanings. These findings support the dual memory systems account of vocabulary acquisition and suggest that the association of a new phonological form with semantic information is critical for the development of stable lexical representations.     

Individual differences in word recognition latency

Previous studies of the effects of word characteristics on word recognition have used orthogonal combinations of word variables and have failed to consider individual differences. The present study examined word naming (Experiment 1) and lexical decision (Experiment 2) tasks using an unrestricted set of words and a correlational analysis. Individual differences were considered using a measure of the subjects’ knowledge of the English vocabulary. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that log (RT) for word naming is affected by word length, word frequency, and the number of syllables in the word; the results of Experiment 2 confirmed the effects of length and frequency but also showed that log (RT) is a function of the age at which the word is introduced to a child’s reading vocabulary. Subjects with a high vocabulary score were more rapid in Experiment 1 but were slower in Experiment 2, compared to subjects with a low vocabulary score. More importantly, high-vocabulary subjects, in both studies, were less affected by word length than the low-vocabulary subjects. The results suggest that subjects do differ in their reading strategy and that word length and word frequency may affect different stages in the word recognition process.     

汉语儿童读词者的认知特征及其影响因素

读词者是指能够流畅地进行字词识别和解码, 却难以很好地理解文本内容的学生。以840名小学一到六年级学生为研究对象, 对其进行阅读速度、阅读理解、语素意识(包括同音语素意识、同形语素意识和复合语素意识)、汉字识别、口语词汇、工作记忆、一般智力等测查, 通过现状描述和多分类logistic回归分析, 结果发现：(1)一年级汉语儿童读词者的检出率为0.7%, 二年级之后的检出率在6.5%~10.1%之间; (2)在语言特异性认知因素上, 控制了年龄和智力后, 与其他学生相比, 读词者在汉字识别任务上表现较好, 在语素意识各个任务及口语词汇上表现较差; (3)年龄和智力是造成读词者比率增加的一般因素; (4)同音语素意识和口语词汇是造成读词者比率增加的语言特异性认知因素。