An official website of the United States government
Abstract To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch‐contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time‐course with which English‐learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30‐month‐olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 24‐month‐olds, and 18‐month‐olds. The older two groups were tested using the language‐guided‐looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24‐month‐olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well—conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24 months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen‐month‐olds learned both pitch‐contrasted and vowel‐contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native‐language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). We contextualize our findings within other recent work in this area.
more »
« less
Integration of Thought and Action: Arm Weights Facilitate Search Accuracy in 24‐Month‐Old Children
Search errors are common in cognitive tasks with infants and toddlers, and these errors reveal important insights to the development of competence and performance. Rivière and Lécuyer (2008,Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,100, 1) demonstrated that 29‐month‐olds typically make an error during a search task involving invisible displacement. However, performance improves significantly when children wear weighted wrist bands while doing the task. To investigate this phenomenon further, we tested 24‐month‐old children in an identical search task (N = 35). Half the children wore weighted wrist bands, and the rest were in a no‐weight condition. To test how far this phenomenon generalizes, we also tested the same children in a second search task where they needed to find a ball that had rolled behind one of four doors. The results showed that children in the no‐weight condition replicated previous findings of poor performance on both search tasks. Unlike 29‐month‐olds, the 24‐month‐olds in the weighted condition did not immediately show improvement on the search tasks. However, after an initial search attempt, children wearing weights performed significantly better than chance. The findings shed new light on the interplay between thought and action.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1729720
- PAR ID:
- 10040849
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Infancy
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1525-0008
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 173-193
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.more » « less
-
When children learn their native language, they tend to treat objects as if they only have one label—a principle known as mutual exclusivity. However, bilingual children are faced with a different cognitive challenge—they need to learn to associate two labels with one object. In the present study, we compared bilingual and monolingual 24-month-olds' performance on a challenging and semi-naturalistic forced-choice referent selection task and retention test. Overall, both language groups performed similarly on referent selection but differed on retention. Specifically, while monolingual infants showed some retention, bilingual infants performed at chance and significantly worse than their monolingual peers.more » « less
-
Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults’ target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in the voicing of the initial consonant, but children did not show any such decrement in target fixation. For both children and adults, most learners did not treat the pho- nologically distinct variant as a different word. Acoustic-phonetic variability during teaching did not have consistent effects. Thus, under conditions of intensive short-term training, 24- and 30-month-olds did not differentiate a newly learned word from a variant differing only in consonant voicing. High task complexity during training could explain why mispronunciation detec- tion was weaker here than in some prior studies.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with ASD participated in a categorical induction task; the TD children performed significantly better and more consistently than the children with ASD. Concurrent verbal and nonverbal tests were not significant correlates; however, the TD children's shape bias performance at two years of age was significantly positively predictive of categorical induction performance at age five. The shape bias, the tendency to extend a novel label to other objects of the same shape during word learning, appears linked with categorical induction ability in TD children, suggesting a common underlying skill and consistent developmental trajectory. Word learning and categorical induction appear uncoupled in children with ASD.more » « less
