Abstract
It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsistencies across studies, however, mean that it is not clear whether this relationship is causal or correlational, whether it is present right across development, or whether it extends beyond word learning to affect other aspects of language learning, like syntax acquisition. To address these issues, the current study used the looking-while-listening paradigm devised by Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) to test the speed with which a large longitudinal cohort of children (the Language 0–5 Project) processed language at 19, 25, and 31 months of age, and took multiple measures of vocabulary (UK-CDI, Lincoln CDI, CDI-III) and syntax (Lincoln CDI) between 8 and 37 months of age. Processing speed correlated with vocabulary size - though this relationship changed over time, and was observed only when there was variation in how well the items used in the looking-while-listening task were known. Fast processing speed was a positive predictor of subsequent vocabulary growth, but only for children with smaller vocabularies. Faster processing speed did, however, predict faster syntactic growth across the whole sample, even when controlling for concurrent vocabulary. The results indicate a relatively direct relationship between processing speed and syntactic development, but point to a more complex interaction between processing speed, vocabulary size and subsequent vocabulary growth.
Highlights
We are coming to realise that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on the way their processing system is developing
Recent research has isolated one processing constraint that seems to play a key role in driving development: the speed with which children process familiar words seems to explain a significant proportion of the variance in the speed of children’s vocabulary growth
The proposed mechanism behind this finding is rarely spelled out, but some have suggested that faster processing of familiar words frees up resources that can be dedicated to the learning of new words (Fernald & Marchman, 2012), that having more experience hearing and using speech results in a larger lexical network, which improves lexical processing speed across the board, for both new and old words (Fernald et al, 2006), or that the extent and diversity of lexical and sub-lexical information stored in the lexicon drives both the speed of processing of familiar chunks, and the speed of vocabulary acquisition (Jones & Rowland, 2017)
Summary
We are coming to realise that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on the way their processing system is developing. Recent research has isolated one processing constraint that seems to play a key role in driving development: the speed with which children process familiar words seems to explain a significant proportion of the variance in the speed of children’s vocabulary growth. This observation is based on a large number of studies showing that young children who react faster to questions like “Where’s the dog?” in a looking-while-listening paradigm have larger vocabularies (e.g., Fernald, Perfors, & Marchman, 2006; Marchman, Adams, Loi, Fernald, & Feldman, 2015). The proposed mechanism behind this finding is rarely spelled out, but some have suggested that faster processing of familiar words frees up resources that can be dedicated to the learning of new words (Fernald & Marchman, 2012), that having more experience hearing and using speech results in a larger lexical network, which improves lexical processing speed across the board, for both new and old words (Fernald et al, 2006), or that the extent and diversity of lexical and sub-lexical information stored in the lexicon drives both the speed of processing of familiar chunks, and the speed of vocabulary acquisition (Jones & Rowland, 2017)
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