Acquisition of the Meaning of the Word Orange Requires Understanding of the Meanings of Red,Pink, and Purple: Constructing a Lexicon as a Connected System

This research investigated how children build up the language-specific system of the color lexicon, examining factors that play important roles for the construction of an adult-like color lexicon. We had 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Japanese-speaking children and adults (n = 20, 18, 19, and 19, respectively) produce names for 93 color swatches. The results showed that children of all ages were able to apply most of the chromatic words to the colors close to the center of each category, but even 5-year-olds struggle to delineate the boundaries between the words. Furthermore, the model analyses revealed that broad-covering and high-frequency words are mapped to the center of the lexical category earlier. However, cross-individual consistency in adults' use contributed most strongly for the adult-like boundary delineation. The results suggest that the process of system construction consists of at least two steps (i.e., mapping words to their category center and finding appropriate boundaries between neighboring words), with the quantity and the quality of the input contributing differently to the steps.     

Methods,minds, memory,and kinds

ABSTRACT

The acquisition of a skill, or knowledge-how, on the one hand, and the acquisition of a piece of propositional knowledge on the other, appear to be different sorts of epistemic achievements. Does this difference lie in the nature of the knowledge involved, marking a joint between knowledge-how and propositional knowledge? Intellectualists say no: All knowledge is propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualists say yes: Knowledge-how and propositional knowledge are different in kind. What resources or methods may we legitimately and fruitfully employ to adjudicate this debate? What is (or are) the right way(s) to show the nature of the knowledge knowers know? Here too there is disagreement. I defend the legitimacy of the anti-intellectualist appeal to cognitive neuroscientific findings against a recent claim that anti-intellectualists conflate the scientific categories of procedural and declarative knowledge with the mental kinds of skill (knowledge-how) and propositional knowledge, respectively. I identify two kinds of arguments for this claim and argue that neither succeeds.     

Words with Consistent Diachronic Usage Patterns are Learned Earlier: A Computational Analysis Using Temporally Aligned Word Embeddings

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for frequency, contextual diversity, concreteness, length, dominant part of speech, orthographic neighborhood density, and diachronic frequency variation. We analyze measures of language change tackling both the change in lexical representations and the change in the relation between lexical representations and the words with the most similar usage patterns, showing that they capture different aspects of language change. Our results show a unique relation between language change and AoA, which is stronger when considering neighborhood-level measures of language change: Words with more coherent diachronic usage patterns tend to be acquired earlier. The results support theories positing a link between ontogenetic and ethnogenetic processes in language.     

Newborns discriminate utterance-level prosodic contours

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate well-formed utterance-level prosodic contours from ill-formed, backward prosodic contours at birth. This deviant prosodic contour was obtained by time-reversing the original one, and super-imposing it on the otherwise intact segmental information. The resulting backward prosodic contour was thus unfamiliar to the infants and ill-formed in French. We used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) in 1-3-day-old French newborns (n = 25) to measure their brain responses to well-formed contours as standards and their backward prosody counterparts as deviants in the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas bilaterally. A cluster-based permutation test revealed greater responses to the Deviant than to the Standard condition in right temporal areas. These results suggest that newborns are already capable of detecting utterance-level prosodic violations at birth, a key ability for breaking into the native language, and that this ability is supported by brain areas similar to those in adults.

Research Highlights

• At birth, infants have sophisticated speech perception abilities.
• Prosody may be particularly important for early language development.
• We show that newborns are already capable of discriminating utterance-level prosodic contours.
• This discrimination can be localized to the right hemisphere of the neonate brain.

     

Learning to pause: Fidelity of and biases in the developmental acquisition of gaps in the communicative signals of a songbird

The temporal organization of sounds used in social contexts can provide information about signal function and evoke varying responses in listeners (receivers). For example, music is a universal and learned human behavior that is characterized by different rhythms and tempos that can evoke disparate responses in listeners. Similarly, birdsong is a social behavior in songbirds that is learned during critical periods in development and used to evoke physiological and behavioral responses in receivers. Recent investigations have begun to reveal the breadth of universal patterns in birdsong and their similarities to common patterns in speech and music, but relatively little is known about the degree to which biological predispositions and developmental experiences interact to shape the temporal patterning of birdsong. Here, we investigated how biological predispositions modulate the acquisition and production of an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent pauses (“gaps”) between vocal elements (“syllables”). Through analyses of semi-naturally raised and experimentally tutored zebra finches, we observed that juvenile zebra finches imitate the durations of the silent gaps in their tutor's song. Further, when juveniles were experimentally tutored with stimuli containing a wide range of gap durations, we observed biases in the prevalence and stereotypy of gap durations. Together, these studies demonstrate how biological predispositions and developmental experiences differently affect distinct temporal features of birdsong and highlight similarities in developmental plasticity across birdsong, speech, and music.

Research Highlights

• The temporal organization of learned acoustic patterns can be similar across human cultures and across species, suggesting biological predispositions in acquisition.
• We studied how biological predispositions and developmental experiences affect an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent intervals between vocal elements (“gaps”).
• Semi-naturally and experimentally tutored zebra finches imitated the durations of gaps in their tutor's song and displayed some biases in the learning and production of gap durations and in gap variability.
• These findings in the zebra finch provide parallels with the acquisition of temporal features of speech and music in humans.

     

The neonate brain's sensitivity to repetition-based structure: Specific to speech?

Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., “babamu”) than to random ABC sequences (e.g., “bamuge”). Whether this ability is specific to speech or also applies to other auditory stimuli remains unexplored. To investigate this, we tested whether newborns are sensitive to regularities in musical tones. Neonates listened to AAB and ABC tones sequences, while their brain activity was recorded using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). The paradigm, the frequency of occurrence and the distribution of the tones were identical to those of the syllables used in previous studies with speech. We observed a greater inverted (negative) hemodynamic response to AAB than to ABC sequences in the bilateral temporal and fronto-parietal areas. This inverted response was caused by a decrease in response amplitude, attributed to habituation, over the course of the experiment in the left fronto-temporal region for the ABC condition and in the right fronto-temporal region for both conditions. These findings show that newborns’ ability to discriminate AAB from ABC sequences is not specific to speech. However, the neural response to musical tones and spoken language is markedly different. Tones gave rise to habituation, whereas speech was shown to trigger increasing responses over the time course of the study. Relatedly, the repetition regularity gave rise to an inverted hemodynamic response when carried by tones, while it was canonical for speech. Thus, newborns’ ability to detect repetition is not speech-specific, but it engages distinct brain mechanisms for speech and music.

Research Highlights

• The ability of newborns’ to detect repetition-based regularities is not specific to speech, but also extends to other auditory modalities.
• The brain mechanisms underlying speech and music processing are markedly different.

     

Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009)

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side. In the original experiment, both mono- and bilingual infants anticipated where the visual stimulus would appear during pre-switch trials. However, during post-switch trials, only bilingual children anticipated that the stimulus would appear on the other side of the screen. The authors took this as evidence of a cognitive advantage. Using the exact same materials in combination with novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses), we assessed the robustness of these findings in four babylabs (N = 98). Our results did not replicate the original findings: although anticipatory looks increased slightly during post-switch trials for both groups, bilingual infants were not better switchers than monolingual infants. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence either. The results highlight the importance of multicenter replications and more fine-grained statistical analyses to better understand child development.

Highlights

• We carried out an exact replication across four baby labs of the high-impact study by Kovács and Mehler (2009).
• We did not replicate the findings of the original study, calling into question the robustness of the claim that bilingual infants have enhanced cognitive abilities.
• After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants correctly associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence.
• The use of novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses) allowed us to draw better-informed conclusions.

     

The Zhuangzi on Coping with Society

Stories in the Zhuangzi detailing expert artisans and other extraordinary people are often read as celebrations of “skills” or “knacks.” In this paper, I will argue that they would be more accurately understood as “coping” stories. Taken as a celebration of one’s “skill” or “knack” they transform the Zhuangzi into an implicit advocate of conforming to, or even identifying with, one’s social roles. I will argue that the stories of artisans and extraordinarily skilled people are less about cultivating one’s talents so as to “find one’s calling,” better fulfill social expectations, or achieve oneness with Dao, than they are concerned with developing strategies for coping with natural and social contingencies. Read in this way, there is much to learn from the Zhuangzi when reflecting on contemporary social and political issues, especially those related to meritocratic hubris.