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We investigate the roles of linguistic and sensory experience in the early-produced visual, auditory, and abstract words of congenitally-blind toddlers, deaf toddlers, and typicallysighted/ hearing peers. We also assess the role of language access by comparing early word production in children learning English or American Sign Language (ASL) from birth, versus at a delay. Using parental report data on child word production from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, we found evidence that while children produced words referring to imperceptible referents before age 2, such words were less likely to be produced relative to words with perceptible referents. For instance, blind (vs. sighted) children said fewer highly visual words like “blue” or “see”; deaf signing (vs. hearing) children produced fewer auditory signs like HEAR. Additionally, in spoken English and ASL, children who received delayed language access were less likely to produce words overall. These results demonstrate and begin to quantify how linguistic and sensory access may influence which words young children produce.
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Predicting Word Learning in Children from the Performance of Computer Vision Systems
For human children as well as machine learning systems, a key challenge in learning a word is linking the word to the visual phenomena it describes. We explore this aspect of word learn- ing by using the performance of computer vision systems as a proxy for the difficulty of learning a word from visual cues. We show that the age at which children acquire different categories of words is correlated with the performance of visual classifi- cation and captioning systems, over and above the expected effects of word frequency. The performance of the computer vision systems is correlated with human judgments of the con- creteness of words, which are in turn a predictor of children’s word learning, suggesting that these models are capturing the relationship between words and visual phenomena.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2107048
- PAR ID:
- 10542039
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 1069-7977
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Sydney, Australia
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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