A developmental shift from similar to language-specific strategies in verb acquisition: A comparison of English, Spanish, and Japanese

The world’s languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown videos of an animated star performing a novel manner along a novel path paired with a language-appropriate nonsense verb. They were then asked to extend that verb to either the same manner or the same path as in training. Across languages, toddlers (2- and 2.5-year-olds) revealed a significant preference for interpreting the verb as a path verb. In preschool (3- and 5-year-olds) and adulthood, the participants displayed language-specific patterns of verb construal. These findings illuminate the way in which verb construal comes to reflect the properties of the input language.

from Cognition

Language or music, mother or Mozart? Structural and environmental influences on infants’ language networks

Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initial specialization of the human brain for speech processing. Our earlier research demonstrated that an adult-like left-lateralized network of perisylvian areas is already active when infants listen to sentences in their native language, but did not address the issue of the specialization of this network for speech processing. Here we used fMRI to study the organization of brain activity in two-month-old infants when listening to speech or to music. We also explored how infants react to their mother’s voice relative to an unknown voice. The results indicate that the well-known structural asymmetry already present in the infants’ posterior temporal areas has a functional counterpart: there is a left-hemisphere advantage for speech relative to music at the level of the planum temporale. The posterior temporal regions are thus differently sensitive to the auditory environment very early on, channelling speech inputs preferentially to the left side. Furthermore, when listening to the mother’s voice, activation was modulated in several areas, including areas involved in emotional processing (amygdala, orbito-frontal cortex), but also, crucially, a large extent of the left posterior temporal lobe, suggesting that the mother’s voice plays a special role in the early shaping of posterior language areas. Both results underscore the joint contributions of genetic constraints and environmental inputs in the fast emergence of an efficient cortical network for language processing in humans.

from Brain and Language

Hearing aid noise reduction algorithms and the acquisition of novel speech contrasts by young children

A previous study by the authors concluded that digital noise reduction (DNR) does not have an influence on the acquisition of a second language in adults. On the basis of results from adult subjects, it was inferred that DNR is not likely to influence language acquisition in pre-verbal infants. The present study serves as an update to determine whether the tasks being modeled could be conducted with younger participants of 4-and 5-years of age, and whether similar results would be found. Two groups of normal-hearing, monolingual English-speaking children were presented with noise-embedded Hindi speech contrasts that were difficult to discriminate. One group listened to both speech items and noise processed with DNR while the other group listened to unprocessed speech in noise. To ensure task appropriateness, these results were also compared to measures from a third group composed of Hindi-speaking children of the same age. Results indicated that Hindi-speaking children performed better than English-speaking children, confirming age-appropriateness of the cross-language task, but that DNR did not enhance nor impair the acquisition of novel speech contrasts by young listeners.

from the Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology</p

A computational model of learning semantic roles from child-directed language

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even in the absence of familiar verbs. Other studies suggest that semantic roles evolve over time, and might best be viewed as a collection of verb-based or general semantic properties. A usage-based account of language acquisition suggests that general roles and their association with grammatical positions can be learned from the data children are exposed to, through a process of generalisation and categorisation.

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic usage-based model of semantic role learning. Our model can acquire associations between the semantic properties of the arguments of an event, and the syntactic positions that the arguments appear in. These probabilistic associations enable the model to learn general conceptions of roles, based only on exposure to individual verb usages, and without requiring explicit labelling of the roles in the input. The acquired role properties are a good intuitive match to the expected properties of various roles, and are useful in guiding comprehension in the model to the most likely interpretation in the face of ambiguity. The learned roles can also be used to select the correct meaning of a novel verb in an ambiguous situation.

from Language and Cognitive Processes

Language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants

There is converging evidence that infants are sensitive to prosodic cues from birth onwards and use this kind of information in their earliest steps into the acquisition of words and syntactic regularities of their target language. Regarding word segmentation, it has been found that English-learning infants segment trochaic words by 7.5 months of age, and iambic words only by 10.5 months of age [Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. M., & Newsome, M. (1999). The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 159–207]. The question remains how to interpret this finding in relation to results showing that English-learning infants develop a preference for trochaic over iambic words between 6 and 9 months of age [Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. (1993). Preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687]. In the following, we report the results of four experiments using the headturn preference procedure (HPP) to explore the trochaic bias issue in German- and French-learning infants. For German, a trochaic preference was found at 6 but not at 4 months, suggesting an emergence of this preference between both ages (Experiments 1 and 2). For French, 6-month-old infants did not show a preference for either stress pattern (Experiment 3) while they were found to discriminate between the two stress patterns (Experiment 4). Our findings are the first to demonstrate that the trochaic bias is acquired by 6 months of age, is language specific and can be predicted by the rhythmic properties of the language in acquisition. We discuss the implications of this very early acquisition for our understanding of the emergence of segmentation abilities.

from Infant Behavior and Development

Investigating the cause of language regularization in adults: Memory constraints or learning effects?.

When language learners are exposed to inconsistent probabilistic grammatical patterns, they sometimes impose consistency on the language instead of learning the variation veridically. The authors hypothesized that this regularization results from problems with word retrieval rather than from learning per se. One prediction of this, that easing the demands of lexical retrieval leads to less regularization, was tested. Adult learners were exposed to a language containing inconsistent probabilistic patterns and were tested with either a standard production task or one of two tasks that reduced the demands of lexical retrieval. As predicted, participants tested with the modified tasks more closely matched the probability of the inconsistent items than did those tested with the standard task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Greater leftward lateralization of the inferior frontal gyrus in second language learners with higher syntactic abilities

There is a great individual variability for acquiring syntactic knowledge in a second language (L2). Little is, however, known if there is any anatomical basis in the brain for individual differences in syntactic acquisition. Here we examined brain structures in 95 nonnative speakers of English, including 78 high-school students and 17 adult international students. We found a significant correlation between the performance of a syntactic task and leftward lateralization of a single region in the triangular part (F3t) of the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been proposed as the grammar center. Moreover, this correlation was independent of the performance of a spelling task, age, gender, and handedness. This striking result suggests that the neural basis for syntactic abilities in L2 is independent of that for lexical knowledge in L2, further indicating that the individual differences in syntactic acquisition are related to the lateralization of the grammar center. Hum Brain Mapp, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

from Human Brain Mapping

School readiness among children with varying histories of language difficulties

This study tested the hypotheses that (a) persistent language difficulties during childhood would predict lower school readiness and (b) language difficulties present just prior to school entry would predict lower school readiness beyond any effects of persistence. The study involved examining indicators of school readiness collected at kindergarten for children exhibiting various histories of language ability based on language measures collected at 15, 24, 36, and 54 months by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Early Child Care Research Network. Children (N = 1,064) were classified according to whether they exhibited expressive or receptive language difficulties at each time point measured. The relation between persistence and timing of these difficulties to each kindergarten outcome was studied through a common factor approach for categorical outcomes. Persistence of language difficulties was not generally related to kindergarten outcomes. However, a robust effect was found for timing of language difficulties: Children who exhibited language difficulties at 54 months exhibited significantly depressed performance on measures of school readiness. Findings are discussed in terms of current policy and research concerning kindergarten readiness for children exhibiting risk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Developmental Psychology

School readiness among children with varying histories of language difficulties.

This study tested the hypotheses that (a) persistent language difficulties during childhood would predict lower school readiness and (b) language difficulties present just prior to school entry would predict lower school readiness beyond any effects of persistence. The study involved examining indicators of school readiness collected at kindergarten for children exhibiting various histories of language ability based on language measures collected at 15, 24, 36, and 54 months by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Early Child Care Research Network. Children (N = 1,064) were classified according to whether they exhibited expressive or receptive language difficulties at each time point measured. The relation between persistence and timing of these difficulties to each kindergarten outcome was studied through a common factor approach for categorical outcomes. Persistence of language difficulties was not generally related to kindergarten outcomes. However, a robust effect was found for timing of language difficulties: Children who exhibited language difficulties at 54 months exhibited significantly depressed performance on measures of school readiness. Findings are discussed in terms of current policy and research concerning kindergarten readiness for children exhibiting risk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Developmental Psychology

The case of the missing generalizations

This review discusses several kinds of linguistic generalizations that pose a challenge for the constructionist approach to linguistic generalizations advocated by Adele Goldberg. It is difficult to see, for example, how such an account can explain the wide-ranging linguistic phenomena governed by structural properties, such as c-command, or semantic properties, such as downward entailment. We also argue against Goldberg’s rejection of formal semantics in favour of an account of meaning based primarily on information structure and discourse function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

from Cognitive Linguistics

Developing constructions

In commenting on Goldberg’s article and book (Goldberg 2006), I concentrate on three points: (1) the importance of general learning mechanisms for language acquisition; (2) the relationship between form and function in learning and in the adult system; and (3) the combination of constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

from Cognitive Linguistics

Constructions at work or at rest?

We question whether Adele Goldberg fulfills her self-declared goal in “Constructions at Work”, i.e. to develop a usage-based theory that “can produce an open-ended number of novel utterances based on a finite amount of input”. We point out converging trends in computational linguistics that suggest formalizations of Construction Grammar. In particular, we go into recent developments in Data-Oriented Parsing, such as U-DOP and LFG-DOP, that produce an unlimited number of new utterances based on a finite number of stored form-meaning pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

from Cognitive Linguistics

The Roots of the Early Vocabulary in Infants’ Learning From Speech

from Current Directions in Psychological Science

ABSTRACT—Psychologists have known for over 20 years that infants begin learning the speech-sound categories of their language during the first 12 months of life. This fact has dominated researchers’ thinking about how language acquisition begins, although the relevance of this learning to the child’s progress in language acquisition has never been clear. Recently, views of the role of infancy in language acquisition have begun to change, with a new focus on the development of the vocabulary. Infants’ learning of speech-sound categories and infants’ abilities to extract regularities in the speech stream allow learning of the auditory forms of many words. These word forms then become the foundation of the early vocabulary, support children’s learning of the language’s phonological system, and contribute to the discovery of grammar.

Language as shaped by the brain

from Behavioral and Brain Functions

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a “moving target” both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG – the mesh between learners and languages – arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent “organism,” which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.

UBC scientist unveils secret of newborn’s first words

from EurekAlert.org

A new study could explain why “daddy” and “mommy” are often a baby’s first words – the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns.