Task-appropriate input supports word–object association in 14-month-old female infants

Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word–object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense words bin and din. We used these productions to determine if they had a differential effect on 14-month-old infants’ word–object association abilities. Females hearing the words spoken to the older infant, but not those to the younger, succeeded. We suggest that the task-appropriateness of utterances can support infant word learning.

Fourteen-month-olds’ sensitivity to acoustic salience in minimal pair word learning

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task. The first two experiments demonstrate that acoustic differences boost infants’ detection of contrasts. However, infants cannot detect the contrast when the segments are digitally shortened. Thus, not all minimal contrasts are equally difficult, and the acoustic properties of a contrast matter in word learning.

Dealing with variability in loanword integration

This chapter tests a strong loanword integration hypothesis: that donor-language material that has been borrowed will display variability in morphosyntactic integration paralleling that of the recipient language. This requires explicitly marshalling the recipient language as the benchmark for comparison, an innovation implemented here for the first time. Illustrating with the typologically different Tamil-English language pair, word order and case-marking of English-origin objects of Tamil verbs are analyzed. English indirect objects are overwhelmingly inflected with Tamil dative markers, but direct objects tend not to be marked for the accusative. Comparison reveals that this patterning reflects the case-marking variability inherent in the recipient-language benchmark, compelling us to recognize even these apparently bare forms as borrowed, and supporting the Nonce Borrowing Hypothesis. This demonstrates that the facts of variability must be taken into account to identify which forms have been borrowed and which have been code-switched.

Minimal-pair word learning by bilingual toddlers: the Catalan /e/-/ɛ/ contrast revisited

Twelve-month-old bilingual and monolingual infants show comparable phonetic discrimination skills for vowels belonging to their native language/s. However, Catalan–Spanish bilingual toddlers, but not Catalan monolinguals, appear insensitive to a vowel mispronunciation in familiar words involving the Catalan–Specific /e/-/ɛ/ contrast. Here bilingual and monolingual toddlers were tested in a challenging minimal-pair word learning task involving that contrast (i.e., [bepi]-[bɛpi]). Both groups succeeded, suggesting that bilinguals can successfully use their phonetic categories to phonologically encode novel words. It is argued that bilinguals’ impoverished vowel representations in familiar words might be the result of experiential input factors (e.g., cognate words and mispronunciations due to accented speech).

Here's looking at you, baby: What gaze and movement reveal about minimal pair word-object association at 14 months

The ability, or lack thereof, of 14-month-old infants to associate novel, minimal pair word-forms with novel objects in a variety of experimental settings has been a crucial research window into how infants go about the quintessential linguistic task of learning words. Here we ask whether the presence of a human interactor in the experimental setting facilitates minimal pair word-object association at this age. In addition to standard looking time measures to test this question, we also introduce the use of measures of infant movement derived by the application of an efficient algorithm that measures motion from 2D video. Infant gaze patterns across the experimental session identified two groups of infants, those engaging in more and those engaging in less mutual gaze with the Experimenter; both groups demonstrated success in the task by both looking time and movement measures. Infants did not succeed in the task by either measure when a videotaped Experimenter presented the labels. We suggest that infants at this age are in transition from being good “information consumers” to becoming good “information seekers,” and that the presence of the live Experimenter plays a crucial role in making it possible for infants to demonstrate their nascent word learning abilities. Further, we explore insights into the looking time results provided by the movement measures as well as novel contributions to our understanding of language acquisition afforded by the examination of infant movement.

Paired Associate Rote Learning in Deaf and Hearing Subjects

Ninety-two deaf and 92 hearing subjects were administered a four-pair and an eight-pair word-numeral task under three methods for demonstrating the correct pairs. On each task, the deaf and hearing groups did not differ in number of pairs learned. Neither did they respond differentially to the three methods. For both groups, the effects of the methods varied with task length. On the four-pair task, list-demonstration and item-demonstration were similarly effective, while both methods were more effective than no-demonstration; on the eight-pair task, list-demonstration was most effective, while item-demonstration and no-demonstration did not differ in effectiveness.