1-151 - Online Measures of Word Comprehension Inform Studies of Language Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Understanding language requires listeners to sort through thousands of potential lexical candidates in the space of milliseconds. Tracking infants’ gaze as they listen to language thus provides a sensitive measure of comprehension ability. It also reveals a rich interplay between real-time comprehension, language input, and language outcomes. Thus, online processing may shed light on the learning mechanisms that drive language development. The studies in this symposium harness the power of online-processing measures to investigate language learning. The first presentation shows that while word comprehension begins at 6 months, it dramatically increases at 12-14-months. This suggests that the nature of infants’ nascent lexical representations may undergo a qualitative change as parallel shifts occur in motor and social development. The second presentation shows that infants who process familiar words more quickly also learn novel words better from limited exposure. Thus, online processing goes beyond providing a measure of what infants know: it controls the efficiency of new learning. The third presentation shows that both real-time word recognition and novel word-learning are strongly tied to how well children know semantically-related words. Thus, language development, while benefitting from rich exposure to speech, may be also be driven by lexical organization. The discussant, an expert in in real-time measures of language, will offer critical analysis of the use of real-time measures to study the mechanisms of language learning. These presentations highlight important aspects of word learning that static vocabulary measures miss: they underscore the integral role of online language processing in further lexical development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Jill Lany, University of Notre Dame

Discussant

• Bob McMurray, University of Iowa

Individual Presentations

• Non-Linearities in Word Comprehension Trajectories - Presenting Author: Elika Bergelson, University of Rochester; Daniel Swingley, University of Pennsylvania

• Does Speech-Processing Efficiency Relate to Language Learning Ability? - Presenting Author: Jill Lany, University of Notre Dame

• Real-time Lexical Processing in Infancy is Associated with Individual Categorical Knowledge - Presenting Author: Arielle Borovsky, Florida State University; Erica Ellis, University of California San Diego; Julia Evans, University of Texas at Dallas; Jeff Elman, University of California San Diego