2-076 - Finding similarities and patterns in early language learning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

This symposium explores the processes that drive language learning. These papers find effects of perceptual similarity, lexical relatedness, and syntactic structure across stages of learning. Presentation 1 investigated the role of perceptual comparison in acquiring a new property term. 3-and 4-year-olds were able to extract the meaning of a novel property word in an incidental learning situation, but only if exposed to visually similar (highly alignable) objects. Presentation 2 found that immediate opportunities to detect recurring structure facilitated word learning through promoting comparison and contrast. Repetition of novel words across successive sentences facilitated infants’ word segmentation and toddlers’ word learning. Presentation 3 investigated the organization of word knowledge in 24-month-olds using a priming task. Early in learning, visual similarity and lexical co-occurrence are the primary contributors to relatedness among words. With increasing syntactic knowledge, children become sensitive to whether words have occurred in the same syntactic role. Presentation 4 investigated whether experience can alter children’s preferred syntactic structure for a given verb. After exposure to a set of sentences in a given syntactic pattern, 4-year-olds and adults shifted their production pattern in the direction of the training; further, this shift was greater when the training pattern was unexpected. Together, these findings suggest that children are sensitive to similarities at the perceptual, lexical and syntactic levels, and that sensitivity to language-specific structures increases over development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Structural alignment facilitates spontaneous property word learning in preschoolers - Presenting Author: Ruxue Shao, Northwestern University; Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University

• Repetition across successive sentences facilitates word segmentation and word learning in young children - Presenting Author: Jessica Schwab, Princeton University; Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• The learning processes behind lexical-semantic organization in infancy and early childhood - Presenting Author: Erica Wojcik, Skidmore College; Jenny Saffran, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Linking verbs to syntax: statistical learning alters verb bias in preschoolers and adults - Presenting Author: Yi Lin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Cynthia Fisher, University of Illinois