Experience vs. Maturation: Development of Abilities to Form Semantic Links from Co-occurrence Regularities in Language

• In Event: The Development of Memory Organization: Converging Insight From Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

With development and experience, we acquire organized semantic knowledge about the world, in which concepts denoted by words are interconnected by meaningful links. For example, our knowledge about apples is linked to our knowledge of juiciness and pears. The development of semantic organization follows a typical trajectory, in which associative links, such as those connecting juicy and apple, tend to emerge before taxonomic links between concepts similar in meaning, such as those connecting apple and pear. Is this developmental trajectory simply the result of increasing experience with the world, or is it also due to the maturation of abilities to form semantic links from experience?

To disentangle the contributions of experience and maturation to the development of semantic organization, we focused on the contribution of experience with language, because language is rich in statistical regularities that can in principle foster semantic links between concepts. Specifically, words denoting associatively related concepts tend to reliably co-occur in language (juicy apple, juicy pear), while words denoting concepts similar in meaning tend to have overlapping patterns of co-occurrence (e.g., apple and pear co-occur with juicy). Therefore, merely acquiring experience with language may drive the development of semantic organization. Alternatively, exposure to co-occurrence regularities may drive semantic development only in conjunction with the maturation of abilities to form links from these regularities. Current study is designed to differentiate between the roles of experience and maturation, by examining the developmental differences in forming novel semantic links when exposure to co-occurrence regularities is experimentally controlled.

Across a set of experiments, we tested whether 4-year-old children and adults can form novel semantic links when the only information they have is the pattern of occurrence of words in language. Participants listened to sentences such as “I saw a foobly apple” or “They have foobly mipp there” in which novel and familiar words reliably co-occurred. From exposure to these sentences, participants could form (a) associative-like links based on simple word co-occurrences (foobly-apple, foobly-mipp) and (b) taxonomic-like links by integrating information across overlapping episodes of co-occurrence (apple-mipp) (Figure 1). Even with the same amount of exposure, we found striking developmental differences in the formation of links across a set of production (free association) and generalization (word-image matching) tasks. Both 4-year-olds and adults formed associative-like links based on word co-occurrence. However, only adults integrated information across separate episodes of co-occurrence to form taxonomic-like links (Figure 1). This developmental pattern remained even when younger participants were given three times the amount of exposure to sentences as adults.

These findings suggest that experience with co-occurrence regularities in language can foster semantic links between concepts. Critically, this experience may only contribute to semantic links as abilities to form semantic links from co-occurrence mature over development. Moreover, the maturation of these abilities may help explain the typical developmental trajectory of semantic organization. Specifically, associative links may typically develop earlier than taxonomic links because abilities to form associative links from simple co-occurrence develop earlier than abilities to form taxonomic links by integrating across overlapping episodes of co-occurrence.

Authors

• Olivera Savic, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Layla Unger
  Non-Presenting Author

• Vladimir Sloutsky, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author