scholarly journals The Role of Reward in Word Learning and Its Implications for Language Acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (21) ◽  
pp. 2606-2611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Ripollés ◽  
Josep Marco-Pallarés ◽  
Ulrike Hielscher ◽  
Anna Mestres-Missé ◽  
Claus Tempelmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning

scholarly journals Predicting the birth of a spoken word

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (41) ◽  
pp. 12663-12668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Roy ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Philip DeCamp ◽  
Matthew Miller ◽  
Deb Roy
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Multimodal Data ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Frequency Of Use

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition.

scholarly journals Bilingual beginnings to learning words

2009 ◽  
Vol 364 (1536) ◽  
pp. 3649-3663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet F. Werker ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein ◽  
Christopher T. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Language Discrimination ◽  
Infancy And Early Childhood

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.

scholarly journals Socially contingent responsivity: finding a link between statistical learning and understanding the referential nature of words

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Luchkina
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Word Learning

One of the central processes of language acquisition is word learning. While many species have been shown to learn word-object associations (e.g., Lyn & Savage-Rumbaugh, 2000; Kaminski, Call, & Fischer, 2004), humans understand the meanings of words and know that that words refer to certain objects, actions, or ideas, not merely recognize associative pairings. This paper explores the role of socially contingent responsivity in the development of the referential understanding of words.

The Role of Reference in Cross-Situational Word Learning (2018, Cognition)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Hao Wang ◽  
Toben Herbert Mintz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Statistical Information ◽  
Unlimited Number ◽  
Referential Ambiguity ◽  
Situational Learning

Word learning involves massive ambiguity, since in a particular encounter with a novel word, there are an unlimited number of potential referents. One proposal for how learners surmount the problem of ambiguity is that learners use cross-situational statistics to constrain the ambiguity: When a word and its referent co-occur across multiple situations, learners will associate the word with the correct referent. Yu & Smith (2007) propose that these co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mapping. Alternative accounts hold that co-occurrence statistics alone are insufficient to support learning, and that learners are further guided by knowledge that words are referential (e.g., Waxman & Gelman, 2009). However, no behavioral word learning studies we are aware of explicitly manipulate subjects’ prior assumptions about the role of the words in the experiments in order to test the influence of these assumptions. In this study, we directly test whether, when faced with referential ambiguity, co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mappings in adult word-learners. Across a series of cross-situational learning experiments, we varied the degree to which there was support for the notion that the words were referential. At the same time, the statistical information about the words’ meanings was held constant. When we overrode support for the notion that words were referential, subjects failed to learn the word-to-referent mappings, but otherwise they succeeded. Thus, cross-situational statistics were useful only when learners had the goal of discovering mappings between words and referents. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of word learning in children’s language acquisition.

Könyvismertetések

2007 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-265
Author(s):  
István Fekete ◽  
Mária Gósy ◽  
Rozália Eszter Ivády ◽  
Péter Kardos
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Perception And Action

DianePecherés RolfA. Zwaan(szerk.): Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking (Fekete István)     253 CsépeValéria: Az olvasó agy (Gósy Mária) 256 Kormos, Judit: Speech production and second language acquisition (Ivády Rozália Eszter)      260 MarosánGyörgy: Hogyan készül a történelem? (Kardos Péter) 263

Language Ideology and Second Language Learning

2008 ◽  
Vol 155 ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa McGarry
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Ideology ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Classroom Practices ◽  
Explanatory Power

AbstractThe increasing recognition of the concept language ideology and the corresponding increasing use of the term have not yet been matched by applications in the field of second language acquisition. However, applications of the concept in analysis of actual classroom practices have shown it to have considerable explanatory power. Greater consideration of language ideology in SLA is necessary not only to achieve greater understanding of the role of ideology in various areas but also to show connections between these areas that may yield important generalizations and to impel the application of the concept in areas where it has been neglected by highlighting its uneven treatment.

scholarly journals Attribution of autonomy and its role in robotic language acquisition

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Förster ◽  
Kaspar Althoefer
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Baseline Scenario ◽  
Behavioral Repertoire ◽  
High Frequencies ◽  
Emotional Displays ◽  
And Robotics ◽  
Respective Characteristic

AbstractThe false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed.

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