Why is number word learning hard? Evidence from bilingual learners

Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn the meanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated this developmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relative contributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the construction of numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specific words onto these concepts. We found that children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in each language, indicating that observed delays in learning these words are attributable to difficulties in mapping words to concepts. In contrast, children generally learned to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in their two languages, suggesting that the difficulty in learning to count is not tied to a specific language. We also replicated previous studies that found that children learn the counting procedure before they learn its logic – i.e., that for any natural number, n, the successor of n in the count list denotes the cardinality n + 1. Consistent with past studies, we found that children’s knowledge of successors is first acquired incrementally. In bilinguals, we found that this knowledge exhibits item-specific transfer between languages, suggesting that the logic of the positive integers may not be stored in a language-specific format. We conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number words are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned in a format that is independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development.     

Revise and resubmit: How real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition

We present the results from a three-day artificial language learning study on adults. The study examined whether sentence-parsing limitations, in particular, difficulties revising initial syntactic/semantic commitments during comprehension, shape learners’ ability to acquire a language. Findings show that both comprehension and production of morphology pertaining to sentence argument structure are delayed when this morphology consistently appears at the end, rather than at the beginning, of sentences in otherwise identical grammatical systems. This suggests that real-time processing constraints impact acquisition; morphological cues that tend to guide linguistic analyses are easier to learn than cues that revise these analyses. Parallel performance in production and comprehension indicates that parsing constraints affect grammatical acquisition, not just real-time commitments. Properties of the linguistic system (e.g., ordering of cues within a sentence) interact with the properties of the cognitive system (cognitive control and conflict-resolution abilities) and together affect language acquisition.     

Co-occurring motor,language and emotional–behavioral problems in children 3–6 years of age

PurposeDevelopmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) has been shown to co-occur with behavioral and language problems in school-aged children, but little is known as to when these problems begin to emerge, or if they are inherent in children with DCD. The purpose of this study was to determine if deficits in language and emotional–behavioral problems are apparent in preschool-aged children with movement difficulties.MethodTwo hundred and fourteen children (mean age 4 years 11 months, SD 9.8 months, 103 male) performed the Movement Assessment Battery for Children 2nd Edition (MABC-2). Children falling at or below the 16th percentile were classified as being at risk for movement difficulties (MD risk). Auditory comprehension and expressive communication were examined using the Preschool Language Scales 4th Edition (PLS-4). Parent-reported emotional and behavioral problems were assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).ResultsPreschool children with diminished motor coordination (n = 37) were found to have lower language scores, higher externalizing behaviors in the form of increased aggression, as well as increased withdrawn and other behavior symptoms compared with their typically developing peers.ConclusionsMotor coordination, language and emotional–behavioral difficulties tend to co-occur in young children aged 3–6 years. These results highlight the need for early intervention.     

Contextual Integration in Multiparty Audience Design

Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective—different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three‐party conversation. Analyses of referential form—expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate—in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge‐scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to‐be‐designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees.     

Self‐Priming in Production: Evidence for a Hybrid Model of Syntactic Priming

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation‐based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime themselves. Here we test whether speakers can be primed by their own productions in three behavioral experiments and find evidence of structural persistence following both comprehension and speakers’ own productions. We also find that comprehension‐based priming effects are larger for rarer syntactic structures than for more common ones, which is most consistent with error‐driven accounts. Because neither error‐driven accounts nor activation‐based accounts fully explain the data, we propose a hybrid model.     

Audience Design in Multiparty Conversation

How do speakers design what they say in order to communicate effectively with groups of addressees who vary in their background knowledge of the topic at hand? Prior findings indicate that when a speaker addresses a pair of listeners with discrepant knowledge, that speakers Aim Low, designing their utterances for the least knowledgeable of the two addressees. Here, we test the hypothesis that speakers will depart from an Aim Low approach in order to efficiently communicate with larger groups of interacting partners. Further, we ask whether the cognitive demands of tracking multiple conversational partners' perspectives places limitations on successful audience design. We find that speakers can successfully track information about what up to four of their partners do and do not know in conversation. When addressing groups of 3–4 addressees at once, speakers design language based on the combined knowledge of the group. These findings point to an audience design process that simultaneously represents the perspectives of multiple other individuals and combines these representations in order to design utterances that strike a balance between the different needs of the individuals within the group.     

The Influence of Shared Visual Context on the Successful Emergence of Conventions in a Referential Communication Task

Human communication is thoroughly context bound. We present two experiments investigating the importance of the shared context, that is, the amount of knowledge two interlocutors have in common, for the successful emergence and use of novel conventions. Using a referential communication task where black‐and‐white pictorial symbols are used to convey colors, pairs of participants build shared conventions peculiar to their dyad without experimenter feedback, relying purely on ostensive‐inferential communication. Both experiments demonstrate that access to the visual context promotes more successful communication. Importantly, success improves cumulatively, supporting the view that pairs establish conventional ways of using the symbols to communicate. Furthermore, Experiment 2 suggests that dyads with access to the visual context successfully adapt the conventions built for one color space to another color space, unlike dyads lacking it. In linking experimental pragmatics with language evolution, the study illustrates the benefits of exploring the emergence of linguistic conventions using an ostensive‐inferential model of communication.     

The role of working memory in syntactic sentence realization: A modeling & simulation approach

This paper examines the effects of working memory size in incremental grammatical encoding during language production. Our experiment tests different variants of a computational-cognitive model that combines an empirically validated framework of general cognition, ACT-R, with a linguistic theory, Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The model is induced from a corpus of spoken dialogue. This methodology facilitates comparison of different strategies and working memory capacities according to the similarity of the model’s produced sentences to the corpus sentences. The experiment presented shows that while having more working memory available improves performance, using less working memory during realization does as well, even after controlling sentence length. Sentences realized with a more incremental strategy also appear to more closely track the naturalistic data. As high incrementality is correlated with low working memory usage, this study offers a possible mechanism by which syntactic incrementality can be explained. Finally, this paper proposes a multi-disciplinary modeling and simulation-based approach to empirical psycholinguistic inquiry.     

Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: Using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before.     

The impact of L1 structural frequency and cognate status on the timing of L2 production

The present study investigates the impact of first language (L1) structural frequency and L1 lexical accessibility, manipulated via cognate status, on second language (L2) speech production. L1 German–L2 English speakers and L1 English speakers completed a production task containing pre- and post-modified possessive noun phrase (NP) constructions (e.g. The actress’s sofa vs. The sofa of the actress) in which the head nouns were English-German cognates (e.g. sofa) or noncognates. While English prefers pre-modified NPs, German has a strong frequency bias for post-modified NPs. L2 English speakers exhibited higher production accuracy than L1 English speakers on post-modified NP sentences. However, facilitative L1 effects in production latencies were restricted to post-modified NP sentences containing cognates and only developed cumulatively after repeated exposure to post-modified NP sentences. We discuss how cognate status and L1 structural frequency differentially influence the accuracy and timing of choosing between different structural alternatives during L2 production.