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Abstract Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language‐learning environment of American English‐learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant‐directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words’ first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents’ speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less‐clear ones. Such multimodal “gems” offer special opportunities for early word learning. Research HighlightsIn parent‐infant interaction, parents’ referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents’ pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand.We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance.Thus, there are globally valuable instances (“gems”) from which children could learn about words’ pronunciations and words’ meanings at the same time.Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less‐clear ones would help children identify these multimodal “gems” during word learning.
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The role of vision in the acquisition of words: Vocabulary development in blind toddlers
Abstract What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent‐report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7–57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N = 6574). We found that on average, blind children showed a roughly half‐year vocabulary delay relative to sighted children, amid considerable variability. However, the content of blind and sighted children's vocabulary was statistically indistinguishable in word length, part of speech, semantic category, concreteness, interactiveness, and perceptual modality. At a finer‐grained level, we also found that words’ perceptual properties intersect with children's perceptual abilities. Our findings suggest that while an absence of visual input may initially make vocabulary development more difficult, the content of the early productive vocabulary is largely resilient to differences in perceptual access. Research HighlightsInfants and toddlers born blind (with no other diagnoses) show a 7.5 month productive vocabulary delay on average, with wide variability.Across the studied age range (7–57 months), vocabulary delays widened with age.Blind and sighted children's early vocabularies contain similar distributions of word lengths, parts of speech, semantic categories, and perceptual modalities.Blind children (but not sighted children) were more likely to say visual words which could also be experienced through other senses.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2337766
- PAR ID:
- 10487051
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Science
- ISSN:
- 1363-755X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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