Word Learning

Word Learning

1. Why word learning is hard

   • CAn't just be 'point and name' - p&n is not common and not universal - when pointing and naming, usually only nouns
   • Underextension - e.g dog - several types of different looking dog
     • Overestension - dog - applied to lion, horse etc

2. Early word knowledge

   • comprehension - precedes production - 2 year olds comprehend 2-3x as many words as they produce (Golden-Meadow et al_ - infants appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 months (losing while listening tasks) - infants start to comprehend verbs (e.g eat, hug) later at around 10 months
     • Between 18-24 months, infants get much faster on the looking while listening task - by 18 months, they don't even need full word
   • Production - 12 months first words, by 24-30 months around 500 words
     • First words form a range of categories - nouns, verbs, social routines (bye, hello), adjectives - there is a lack of things like articles (a, the)
   • Production - early noun bias - Cross linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocab (e.g 40% of English-speaking children's first words) (Nelson)
     • Natural partitions hypothesis (gretner) - early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings - actions, states etc tend to apply to entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined by space and time
     • Socially mediated word learning )Tomasello 2003) - not all early words are nouns (hello, bye) - not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast) - learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult's intentions, irrespective of word class (happens often with nouns)
     • Production successes - words used in a variety of situations - names for people and objects e.g daddy, spoon, - names for actions e.g open, names fro properties e.g gone, more, dirty (tomasello)
     • Errors - underestension - only in specific context or specific exemplar - words used in specific contexts where adults would use wide range of contexts e.g bye only when putting telephone down, there when putting an object location, refer to wordsd flower only to mean rose and not other flowers
       • Overextension - e.g calling a ball an apple, generally makes these errors until around 2.5 yeas - category error (concept of ball is incorrectly n same category as apple) vocab limitations - lack of word ball

3. How children learn

   • Innate constraints on early word learning - Gavaai - how to children know what a word refers to? object constants - words refer to objects, explains early noun bias - whole object constraints - words refer to whole objects rather than their parts - garagai - whole animal, not tail, legs and ears
     • Problems with constrain theories - do constraints explain word learning or just describe it? are constraints innate or learned via experience? are constraints specific to language?
     • Principle of contrast - no two words have exactly the same meaning - explains how the child overcomes overextension
       • Mutual exclusivity - no object has more than one name - helps children override the whole object constraint and learn the name for parts of objects
   • Structural cues to word meaning - Syntactic bootstrapping - gleitman - 3-5 year olds shown picture of someone kneading a substance in a bowl - 'do you know what it means to sib? do you know what a sib is? have you seen any sib? - task - pick sibling, a sib or sib from selection of pictures depicting several actions, substances or contained - sobbing, picture of kneading, sib, picture of bowl, sib, picture of substance (brown 1957)
     • verbs - two year olds use structural cues to narrow down verb meanings - e.g the dog is meeking the man, the man is meeking
       • Nouns/adjectives - used differently in sentences - structural cue
         • Gelman and Markman - 4 year olds pick different objects when told ' find the fep one' and 'find the fep'
           • Nouns - Waxman and Booth - 14 month olds "these are blicketst' (purple horse, purple dog, etc) then asked to give a blicket - category = purple horse and purple plate, property = purple horse and blue horse - child extended noun to category but not to property (success)
             • Same test but 'this is blickish' (adjective) - snuggled to extend to category and also didn't extend to property - seem to understand that it is not a noun, but don't quite get what it actually does
               • Structural cues to nouns seemed to be learned early, but structural cues to other words appear later - 18 month olds show same pattern, 21 month olds are better but not great
               • Issues - children sensitive to some aspects of sentence structure, but not clear exactly what and when - the chicken and the egg - some knowledge of words and word categories is needed to understand their structure - do experimental studies reveal something about long term learning of word meaning or immediate problem solving task?

4. Social Pragmatic Approach

   • Tomasello 2003 - children learn words and word meaning from pragmatic cues in the language learning environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning
     • Word learning is constrained in two main ways - the social world is structured - routines, games, patterned social interactions - social cognitive skills the infant has - joint attention, intention reading
       • Scaffolding and routines - children learn languages in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines - young children learn almost all of their early language in cultural routines e.g feeding, games etc - cross culturally, children are engaged in a wide range of social routines and learn most of their early words in familiar contexts
       • Social cognitive skills - social revolution at around 9 months - during joint attention, adults use language and children attempt to interpret the communicative intent - word learning occurs when children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utterance - the shared common ground reduced the possible referents
   • Children use speaker's intention to infer meaning - child already knows the name of the familiar object on the table and knows adult knows this too - so she can assume thet the adult intends the novel object when the adult asks her to show her the modi - 2 year olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult looking for rather than objects they have rejected
     • Acqusition of verbs - children able to interpret adult's anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action - children are able to differentiate between intended and accidental actions when learning new verbs
   • Issues - what kind of inferential skills does the child bring to the task of language acquisition? can this process of learning account for the acquisition of complex syntax?