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1.
Function words support many aspects of language acquisition. This study investigated whether toddlers understand the number feature of determiners and use it for noun comprehension. French offers an ideal “test case” as number is phonetically marked in determiners but not in nouns. Twenty French‐learning 24‐month‐olds completed a split‐screen experiment. Looking times to target pictures were measured under 3 trial types varying in the degree to which the determiner matched the number displayed in the object(s). Children looked longer when the determiner matched the object(s), and were confused in trials of clear mismatch. Importantly, their processing resembled that of French adults ( D. Dahan, D. Swingley, M. K. Tanenhaus, & J. S. Magnuson, 2000 ). Thus, children understand the determiner number feature early in acquisition and use this knowledge to constrain online comprehension.  相似文献   

2.
Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner the preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which the was either dropped, replaced by a nonsense function word (el), or replaced by an alternate English function word (and). Both the 18- and 24-month-old infants oriented faster and more accurately to a visual target following grammatical sentences. The results suggest that by 18 months of age, infants use their knowledge of determiners in sentence computation and in establishing reference.  相似文献   

3.
Jill Lany 《Child development》2014,85(4):1727-1739
Statistical learning may be central to lexical and grammatical development. The phonological and distributional properties of words provide probabilistic cues to their grammatical and semantic properties. Infants can capitalize on such probabilistic cues to learn grammatical patterns in listening tasks. However, infants often struggle to learn labels when performance requires attending to less obvious cues, raising the question of whether probabilistic cues support word learning. The current experiment presented 22‐month‐olds with an artificial language containing probabilistic correlations between words' statistical and semantic properties. Only infants with higher levels of grammatical development capitalized on statistical cues to support learning word‐referent mappings. These findings suggest that infants' sensitivity to correlations between sounds and meanings may support both word learning and grammatical development.  相似文献   

4.
The early noncry vocalizations of infants are salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30%–50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants’ prelinguistic noncry vocalizations facilitates the development of phonology and speech. Have infants learned that their vocalizations influence the behavior of social partners? If they have, infants should show an extinction burst in vocalizing when adults temporarily stop responding to infant vocalizations. Thirty‐eight 5‐month‐olds were tested in the still‐face paradigm with an unfamiliar adult. When the adult assumed a still face, infants showed an extinction burst. Thus, 5‐month‐olds have learned the social efficacy of their vocalizations on caregivers’ behavior. Furthermore, the magnitude of 5‐month infants’ extinction bursts predicted their language comprehension at 13 months.  相似文献   

5.
This research asks whether analogical processing ability is present in human infants, using the simplest and most basic relation—the same–different relation. Experiment 1 (= 26) tested whether 7‐ and 9‐month‐olds spontaneously detect and generalize these relations from a single example, as previous research has suggested. The attempted replication failed. Experiment 2 asked whether infants could abstract the relation via analogical processing (Experiment 2, = 64). Indeed, with four exemplars, 7‐ and 9‐month‐olds could abstract the same–different relation and generalize it to novel pairs. Furthermore, prior experience with the objects disrupted learning. Facilitation from multiple exemplars and disruption by individual object salience are signatures of analogical learning. These results indicate that analogical ability is present by 7 months.  相似文献   

6.
This study investigated how 4‐month‐old infants represent sequences: Do they track the statistical relations among specific sequence elements (e.g., AB, BC) or do they encode abstract ordinal positions (i.e., B is second)? Infants were habituated to sequences of 4 moving and sounding elements—3 of the elements varied in their ordinal position while the position of 1 target element remained invariant (e.g., A B CD, C B DA)—and then were tested for the detection of changes in the target’s position. Infants detected an ordinal change only when it disrupted the statistical co‐occurrence of elements but not when statistical information was controlled. It is concluded that 4‐month‐olds learn the order of sequence elements by tracking their statistical associations but not their invariant ordinal position.  相似文献   

7.
Infants’ pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants’ pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18‐month‐olds, but not 12‐month‐olds, more readily mapped labels to objects if they had first pointed toward those objects than if they had referenced those objects via other communicative behaviors, such as reaching or gaze alternations. In Study 2, when an experimenter labeled a not pointed‐to‐object, 18‐month‐olds’ pointing was no longer related to enhanced fast mapping. These findings suggest that infants’ pointing gestures reflect a readiness and, potentially, a desire to learn.  相似文献   

8.
This study examined whether 12‐month‐olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word–object (N = 30), Japanese word–object (N = 15), or Czech word–object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated. Infants associated CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words, but not CCVC Czech words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that by 12 months of age, infants are beginning to apply their language‐specific knowledge to their acceptance of word forms. That is, they will not map words that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects.  相似文献   

9.
The time frame for infants' acquisition of language constancy was probed, using the phonetic variation in a rarely heard accent (South African English) or a frequently heard accent (American English). A total of 156 Australian infants were tested. Six‐month‐olds looked longer to Australian English than less commonly heard South African accent, but at 9 months, showed similar looking times. With the more frequently heard American accent, 3‐month‐olds looked longer to Australian and American English, whereas 6‐month‐olds looked equally. Together these results imply that in the 1st year, differential attention to native versus nonnative accents decreases as infants develop a sense of language constancy for the common native language. However, experience with the nonnative accent can expedite this process.  相似文献   

10.
Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own‐ over other‐race faces, but whether this experience has downstream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7‐month‐olds (range = 5.9–8.5 months; = 96) use gaze from own‐ versus other‐race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an event's occurrence with 100% reliability, 7‐month‐olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own‐ over other‐race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own‐ versus other‐race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own versus other race to guide social interaction and learning.  相似文献   

11.
This study investigated the nature of infants’ difficulty understanding references to hidden inaccessible objects. Twelve‐month‐old infants (N = 32) responded to the mention of objects by looking at, pointing at, or approaching them when the referents were visible or accessible, but not when they were hidden and inaccessible (Experiment I). Twelve‐month‐olds (N = 16) responded robustly when a container with the hidden referent was moved from a previously inaccessible position to an accessible position before the request, but failed to respond when the reverse occurred (Experiment II). This suggests that infants might be able to track the hidden object's dislocations and update its accessibility as it changes. Knowing the hidden object is currently inaccessible inhibits their responding. Older, 16‐month‐old (N = 17) infants’ performance was not affected by object accessibility.  相似文献   

12.
Classifying people into categories not only helps humans simplify a complex social world but also contributes to stereotyping and discrimination. This research examines how social categorization develops by testing how language imbues with meaning otherwise arbitrary differences between people. Experimental studies (= 129) with 2‐year‐olds showed that generic language—language that refers to abstract kinds—guides the development of social categorization. Toddlers learned a new category after hearing generic language about individuals who shared an arbitrary perceptual feature but not after hearing matched specific language, simple labels, or plural (but nongeneric) language about the same set of individuals. These findings show how subtle linguistic cues shape the development of social categorization.  相似文献   

13.
In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty‐six English‐learning 7‐ to 9‐month‐olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a path, and then tested on events that changed the manner, path, both, or neither. Infants detected each type of change, but only the girls showed evidence of processing manner and path as independent features. This gender difference provides clues about the universal development of manner and path concepts from more basic perceptual skills. Results have implications for how representations of linguistically relevant semantic elements develop conceptually.  相似文献   

14.
This article presents an eye‐tracking study using a novel combination of visual saliency maps and “area‐of‐interest” analyses to explore online feature extraction during category learning in infants. Category learning in 12‐month‐olds (N = 22) involved a transition from looking at high‐saliency image regions to looking at more informative, highly variable object parts. In contrast, 4‐month‐olds (N = 27) exhibited a different pattern displaying a similar decreasing impact of saliency accompanied by a steady focus on the object’s center, indicating that targeted feature extraction during category learning develops across the 1st year of life. These results illustrate how the effects of lower and higher level processes may be disentangled using a combined saliency map and area‐of‐interest analysis.  相似文献   

15.
With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6‐ and 8‐month‐olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue–reward relation. While 8‐month‐olds showed evidence of increasingly selective attention toward the predictive cues, even when the distractors were highly salient, 6‐month‐olds shifted attention toward the predictive cues only when the distractors were equally (not more) engaging. These experiments suggest that attention in infancy is highly dependent on the relative weightings of predictiveness and visual salience, which may differ across development and context.  相似文献   

16.
The present research used a preferential‐reaching task to examine whether 9‐ and 11‐month‐olds (n = 144) could infer the relative weights of two objects resting on a soft, compressible platform. Experiment 1 established that infants reached preferentially for the lighter of 2 boxes. In Experiments 2–4, infants saw 2 boxes identical except in weight resting on a cotton wool platform. Infants reached prospectively for the lighter box, but only when their initial exploratory activities provided critical information. At 11 months, infants succeeded as long as they first determined that the platform was compressible; at 9 months, infants succeeded only if they also explored the boxes and thus had advance knowledge that they differed in weight.  相似文献   

17.
Two experiments investigated whether infants can use their rich social knowledge to bind representations of individual objects into larger social units, thereby overcoming the three‐item limit of working memory. In Experiment 1, 16‐month‐olds (n = 32) remembered up to four hidden dolls when the dolls had faced and interacted with each other in pairs, but not when they faced and interacted with the infant, suggesting that infants chunked the dolls into social pairs. In Experiment 2 (n = 16), infants failed to remember four dolls when they faced each other without interacting, indicating that interaction between the dolls was necessary to drive chunking. This work bridges a gap between social cognition and memory by demonstrating that infants can use social cues to expand memory.  相似文献   

18.
Two experiments demonstrate that 5‐month‐olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual‐temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior exposure, infants looked longer at the random sequence. In Experiment 2, 17 infants looked equally long at bigram‐ and trigram‐based sequences. However, an analysis of local redundancy revealed that in both experiments disengagement from the sequences was governed by local repetitions rather than by global sequence statistics. This finding suggests that a spontaneous sensitivity to stimulus complexity helps orient infants to sequences they can learn from.  相似文献   

19.
To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co‐occurring talker characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6‐ to 14‐months‐olds by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the new talker condition (n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the mispronunciation condition (n = 98), infants’ mothers “mispronounced” the words (e.g., nazz for nose). Six‐ to 7‐month‐olds fixated target images above chance across conditions, understanding novel talkers, and mothers’ phonologically deviant speech equally. Eleven‐ to 14‐months‐olds also understood new talkers, but performed poorly with mispronounced speech, indicating sensitivity to phonological deviation. Between these ages, performance was mixed. These findings highlight the changing roles of acoustic and phonetic variability in early word comprehension, as infants learn which variations alter meaning.  相似文献   

20.
Early identification of primary language delay is crucial to implement effective prevention programs. Available screening instruments are based on parents' reports and have only insufficient predictive validity. This study employed observational measures of preverbal infants' gestural communication to test its predictive validity for identifying later language delays. Pointing behavior of fifty‐nine 12‐month‐old infants was analyzed and related to their language skills 1 year later. Results confirm predictive validity of preverbal communication for language skills with the hand shape of pointing being superior compared to the underlying motives for pointing (imperative vs. declarative). Twelve‐month‐olds who pointed only with their open hand but never with their index finger were at risk for primary language delay at 2 years of age.  相似文献   

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