The Role of Language in Concept Acquisition in Typical and Atypical Populations

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Children rapidly acquire detailed knowledge about the physical environment, natural categories, and cultural practices (e.g., Baillargeon, 1994; Gelman, 1988; Legare, 2019). While a substantial amount of children’s learning is driven by direct perceptual experience, language contains a vast reservoir of semantic information (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), including visual features of the environment (Lewis et al., 2019), semantic relationships (Unger et al., 2020), and generalizable properties of categories (Tessler & Goodman, 2019). This symposium will bring together scholars from various theoretical perspectives to explore what semantic knowledge children acquire through language, considering development in typical and atypical populations.

Paper 1 will compare naturalistic language input to blind, deaf/hard-of-hearing, and typically-developing infants, focusing on sensory properties of language directed towards each group, with consequences for the semantic information available to children.
Paper 2 will discuss analyses of adjective use in parent-child interaction, demonstrating that speech directed towards children tends to highlight atypical features of objects, and that this tendency grows stronger as children age.
Paper 3 relates lexical co-occurrence regularities in CHILDES to performance on behavioral experiments to show the influence of language co-occurrence statistics on the organization of semantic networks from early childhood onwards.
Discussant: To aid in facilitating discussion about the generalizability of the research presented across learning contexts, we have invited an expert in linguistic categorization and lexical development.

Together, these papers explore the diversity and richness of information encoded in language across different contexts and the limits to the kind of semantic information children can learn from language.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Erin Campbell, Duke University

Discussant

• Barbara Malt, Lehigh University

Individual Presentations

• Early Language in Blind, Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing, and Typically-Developing Infants - Presenting Author: Erin Campbell, Duke University; Non-Presenting Author: Martin Zettersten, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Molly Lewis, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Elika Bergelson, Duke Univeristy

• Children Hear More About What is Atypical Than What is Typical - Presenting Author: Claire Augusta Bergey, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Ben Morris, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Yurovsky, Carnegie Mellon University

• How do Children Make use of Language in Learning the Semantic Structure of the World? - Presenting Author: Layla Unger; Non-Presenting Author: Olivera Savic, Ohio State University; Non-Presenting Author: Vladimir Sloutsky, Ohio State University