Moving beyond "nouns in the lab": Using naturalistic data to understand why infants' first words include uh-oh and hi

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? To explain how and when words are learned, existing theories of word learning prioritize visual information and draw mainly on lab-based studies of noun-to-object mapping. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as uh-oh, hi, more, up, and all-gone, are typically among the first to appear in infants' vocabularies. We combined a behavioral experiment with naturalistic observational research to explore how infants learn and represent this understudied category of high-frequency, routine-based non-nouns, which we term ‘everyday words’. In Study 1, we found that conventional eye-tracking measures of comprehension were insufficient to capture 10- to 16-month-old infants' emerging understanding of everyday words. In Study 2, we analyzed the visual and social scenes surrounding caregivers' and infants' use of everyday words in a naturalistic video corpus. This ecologically-motivated research revealed that everyday words rarely co-occurred with consistent visual referents, making their early learnability difficult to reconcile with dominant word learning theories. Our findings instead point to complex patterns in the types of situations associated with everyday words that could contribute to their early representation in infants’ vocabularies. By leveraging both experimental and observational methods, this investigation underscores the value of using naturalistic data to broaden theories of early learning.

How Changed? Milton, Vida, Vergil, and a Network of Allusion

Satan's first words in Paradise Lost (‘how changed | From him’) famously allude to Book 2 of the Æneid. Interpretations of Satan's character and of the relationship between Milton's epic and its precursor have been enriched through recognition of this arresting intertextual moment. Recent theoretical and methodological innovations can help to reveal yet more about these intertextual dynamics. Milton alludes in a way that takes account of prior links in an allusive chain, responding not only to the Æneid but also to mediating texts, including Vida's Christiad, whose wresting of the Vergilian phrase to fresh use Milton repeats with crucial changes. Milton's allusion should also be situated within an even broader and more generically variegated network of print diffusion. Vergil's phrase became a commonplace, but still ran within semantic circuits relevant to the allusive chain linking post-Vergilian epics. Milton's ‘how changed’ in turn established itself as a poetic formula.

First Words, Last Words

First Words, Last Words charts an intense “pamphlet war” that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vedānta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this dispute lies the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vyāsatīrtha and his grand-pupil Vijayīndratīrtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Vedānta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of Mīmāṃsā interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dīkṣita ostensibly defended this tradition’s preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions.

Orangutan information broadcast via consonant-like and vowel-like calls breaches mathematical models of linguistic evolution

The origin of language is one of the most significant evolutionary milestones of life on Earth, but one of the most persevering scientific unknowns. Two decades ago, game theorists and mathematicians predicted that the first words and grammar emerged as a response to transmission errors and information loss in language's precursor system, however, empirical proof is lacking. Here, we assessed information loss in proto-consonants and proto-vowels in human pre-linguistic ancestors as proxied by orangutan consonant-like and vowel-like calls that compose syllable-like combinations. We played back and re-recorded calls at increasing distances across a structurally complex habitat (i.e. adverse to sound transmission). Consonant-like and vowel-like calls degraded acoustically over distance, but no information loss was detected regarding three distinct classes of information ( viz. individual ID, context and population ID). Our results refute prevailing mathematical predictions and herald a turning point in language evolution theory and heuristics. Namely, explaining how the vocal–verbal continuum was crossed in the hominid family will benefit from future mathematical and computational models that, in order to enjoy empirical validity and superior explanatory power, will be informed by great ape behaviour and repertoire.

Costs and Benefits of Native Language Similarity for Non-native Word Learning

The present study examined the costs and benefits of native language similarity for non-native vocabulary learning. Because learning a second language (L2) is difficult, many learners start with easy words that look like their native language (L1) to jumpstart their vocabulary. However, this approach may not be the most effective strategy in the long-term, compared to introducing difficult L2 vocabulary early on. We examined how L1 orthographic typicality affects pattern learning of novel vocabulary by teaching English monolinguals either Englishlike or Non-Englishlike pseudowords that contained repeated orthographic patterns. We found that overall, the first words that individuals learned during initial acquisition influenced which words they acquired later. Specifically, learning a new word in one session made it easier to acquire an orthographically similar word in the next session. Similarity among non-native words interacted with native language similarity, so that words that looked more like English were easier to learn at first, but they were less effective at influencing later word learning. This demonstrates that although native language similarity has a beneficial effect early on, it may reduce learners' ability to benefit from non-native word patterns during continued acquisition. This surprising finding demonstrates that making learning easier may not be the most effective long-term strategy. Learning difficult vocabulary teaches the learner what makes non-native words unique, and this general wordform knowledge may be more valuable than the words themselves. We conclude that native language similarity modulates new vocabulary acquisition and that difficulties during learning are not always to be avoided, as additional effort early on can pay later dividends.

SEMANTIC SATIATION FOR POETIC EFFECT

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures.

The Analysis of Shouryakugo on Social Media Twitter

This study examined the morphology of shouryakugo on social media Twitter. This study aims to determine the type and process of shouryakugo formation on Twitter. The study data were taken from tweets that were trending with hashtag # 社会 between January and March 2019. A descriptive qualitative design was employed in this study. The data obtained were categorized and analyzed based on the formation process. The results of this study showed the types and processes of shouryakugo formation. The findings include four forms of zenbu shouryakukei, 32 forms of gobu shouryakukei, five forms of chuushouryaku kei, one form of zengo shouryaku kei, and 21 forms of kousei youso tanbun ketsugoukei. Meanwhile, in the process of forming shouryaku, the researcher found four words with the omission of parts or all of the first words, two words with the omission of parts or all of the second words, twenty-five words with the omission of syllables at the end of words, two words with the omission of syllables at the end of the first word and all second words, twenty-one words with the omission of syllables at the end of the first word and the second-word element, three words with the omission of all second words, five words with the omission of middle words, one word with the omission of the first syllable of the first word and the final syllable of the second word.

Finding Better Subwords for Tibetan Neural Machine Translation

Subword segmentation plays an important role in Tibetan neural machine translation (NMT). The structure of Tibetan words consists of two levels. First, words consist of a sequence of syllables, and then a syllable consists of a sequence of characters. According to this special word structure, we propose two methods for Tibetan subword segmentation, namely syllable-based and character-based methods. The former generates subwords based on the Tibetan syllables, and the latter is based on Tibetan characters. In addition, we carry out experiments with these two subword segmentation methods on low-resource Tibetan-to-Chinese NMT, respectively. The experimental results show that both of them can improve translation performance, in which the subword segmentation based on character sequences can achieve better results. Overall, our proposed character-based subword segmentation is more simple and effective. Moreover, it can achieve better experimental results without paying much attention to the linguistic features of Tibetan.