Ambient Language Research Articles

Are Late Talkers Just Late? Neighborhood Density and Word Frequency Properties of Late Talkers' Spoken Vocabularies.

Typically developing toddlers extract patterns from their input to add words to their spoken lexicons, yet some evidence suggests that late talkers leverage the statistical regularities of the ambient language differently than do peers. Using the extended statistical learning account, we sought to compare lexical-level statistical features of spoken vocabularies between late talkers and two typically developing comparison groups. MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories American English Words and Sentences (N = 1,636) were extracted from Wordbank, a database of CDIs. Inventories were divided into three groups: (a) a late talker group (n = 202); (b) a typically developing age-matched group (n = 1,238); and (c) a younger, typically developing group (n = 196) matched to the late talkers on expressive language. Neighborhood density and word frequency were calculated for each word produced by each participant and standardized to z scores. Mixed-effects models were used to evaluate group differences. The late talker and younger, language-matched groups' spoken vocabularies consist, on standardized average, of words from denser phonological neighborhoods and words higher in frequency of occurrence in parent-child speech, compared to older, typically developing toddlers. These findings provide support for the extended statistical learning account. Late talkers appear to generally be extracting and using similar patterns from their language input as do younger toddlers with similar levels of expressive vocabulary. This suggests that late talkers may be following a delayed, not deviant, trajectory of expressive language growth.

Neural processing of speech sounds at premature and term birth: ERPs and MMR between 32 and 42 weeks of gestation

Prenatal listening experience reportedly modulates how humans process speech at birth, but little is known about how speech perception develops throughout the perinatal period. The present experiment assessed the neural event-related potentials (ERP) and mismatch responses (MMR) to native vowels in 99 neonates born between 32 and 42 weeks of gestation. The vowels elicited reliable ERPs in newborns whose gestational age at time of experiment was at least 36 weeks and 1 day (36 + 1). The ERPs reflected spectral distinctions between vowel onsets from age 36 weeks + 6 days and durational distinctions at vowel offsets from age 37 weeks + 6 days. Starting at age 40 + 4, there was evidence of neural discrimination of vowel length, indexed by a negative MMR response. The present findings extend our understanding of the earliest stages of speech perception development in that they pinpoint the ages at which the cortex reliably responds to the phonetic characteristics of individual speech sounds and discriminates a native phoneme contrast. The age at which the brain reliably differentiates vowel onsets coincides with what is considered term age in many countries (37 weeks + 0 days of gestational age). Future studies should investigate to what extent the perinatal maturation of the cortical responses to speech sounds is modulated by the ambient language.

Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings

ABSTRACT Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses. How, then, do children acquire these fine-grained adjectival meanings? In this research, we hypothesize that as with verbs, the linguistic environments in which these adjectives appear provide surface-level distributional cues that narrow the space of meaning. In a proof-of-concept experiment with adults following in the footsteps of the Human Simulation Paradigm, we provide empirical evidence that surface-level linguistic patterns support the acquisition of different subclasses of subjective adjectives. Adults were presented with scripted dialogues featuring novel words in controlled linguistic environments manipulating grammatical subjects, adverbial modifiers, standard phrases, syntactic complements, and evidence of faultless disagreement among speakers. Participants were then asked to guess the word meaning (either incrementally after each ‘frame’ or after multiple frames) and rate their confidence. Results, as measured by the percentage of category-consistent, frame-compliant guesses, paired with an increase in confidence levels, indicate a sensitivity to this surface-level information, thereby highlighting the role of the linguistic environment in supporting the acquisition of adjective meaning.

Lexical and Social Effects on the Learning and Integration of Inflectional Morphology.

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is lessunderstood. We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without socialmeaning. Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream inlearning.

Vocal and early speech development in Korean-acquiring children with hearing loss and typical hearing

ABSTRACT This study investigated the vocal and early speech development of Korean-acquiring children with hearing loss (HL) who underwent early auditory amplification compared to their typical hearing (TH) counterparts. The research focused on phonological characteristics of child vocalisation based on samples collected from naturalistic home environments. One-day home recordings using a Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recorder were obtained from 6 children with HL and 12 children with TH who ranged from 17 to 23 months of age in Korean monolingual environments. Child volubility, canonical babbling ratio (CBR), consonant distributions, and utterance structures of vocalisations were evaluated through qualitative and quantitative analyses of vocalisation samples collected from LENA recordings. The findings revealed that children with HL displayed comparable vocalisation levels to children with TH, with no significant differences in volubility and CBR. In consonant and utterance shape inventories, noticeable quantitative and qualitative differences were observed between children with HL and those with TH. The study also suggested both universal and language-specific production patterns, revealing the early effects of ambient language on consonant distributions and utterance structures within their vocalisation repertoire. This study emphasised the role of auditory input and the importance of early auditory amplification to support speech development in children with HL.

Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan

Abstract Recent findings show adult New Zealanders who do not speak te reo Māori (the Māori language, the indigenous language of New Zealand) nonetheless have impressive implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of the language. These findings have been interpreted as showing that regular ambient exposure to a non-native language develops an implicit “proto-lexicon”, a memory store of lexical forms in that language, without any meaning. However, what is not known is the timeframe over which this knowledge is acquired. Does the knowledge stem exclusively from implicit learning during childhood, or does it continue to grow based on exposure during adulthood? To investigate this question, we directly compare non-Māori-speaking school-aged adolescents and adults in New Zealand and explore how age affects the degree of observed knowledge. Our results show that ambient exposure leads to implicit knowledge both in childhood and adulthood, and that continuing exposure throughout the lifespan leads to increased knowledge.

Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts

Combinatorial thought, or the ability to combine a finite set of concepts into a myriad of complex ideas and knowledge structures, is the key to the productivity of the human mind and underlies communication, science, technology, and art. Despite the importance of combinatorial thought for human cognition and culture, its developmental origins remain unknown. To address this, we tested whether 12-mo-old infants (N = 60), who cannot yet speak and only understand a handful of words, can combine quantity and kind concepts activated by verbal input. We proceeded in two steps: first, we taught infants two novel labels denoting quantity (e.g., "mize" for 1 item; "padu" for 2 items, Experiment 1). Then, we assessed whether they could combine quantity and kind concepts upon hearing complex expressions comprising their labels (e.g., "padu duck", Experiments 2-3). At test, infants viewed four different sets of objects (e.g., 1 duck, 2 ducks, 1 ball, 2 balls) while being presented with the target phrase (e.g., "padu duck") naming one of them (e.g., 2 ducks). They successfully retrieved and combined on-line the labeled concepts, as evidenced by increased looking to the named sets but not to distractor sets. Our results suggest that combinatorial processes for building complex representations are available by the end of the first year of life. The infant mind seems geared to integrate concepts in novel productive ways. This ability may be a precondition for deciphering the ambient language(s) and building abstract models of experience that enable fast and flexible learning.

Neural correlates of lexical-tone and vowel-quality processing in 6- and 9-month-old German-learning infants and adults.

We examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of lexical-tone and vowel-quality perception in learners of a non-tonal language. We tested 25 6- and 25 9-month-old German-learning infants, as well as 24 German adults and expected developmental differences for the two linguistic properties, as they are both carried by vowels, but have a different status in German. In adults, both lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts elicited mismatch negativities, with a stronger response to the vowel-quality contrast. Six-month-olds showed positive mismatch responses for lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts, with an emerging negative mismatch response for vowel-quality only. The negative mismatch responses became more pronounced for the vowel-quality contrast at 9 months, while the lexical-tone contrast elicited mainly positive mismatch responses. Our data reveal differential developmental changes in the processing of vowel properties that differ in their lexical relevance in the ambient language.

Metathesis in Language Acquisition of Greek

This study investigates metathesis in children so that to see if it facilitates their language development and in which way. For this reason, thirteen Greek-speaking children are examined varying in age from 2;6.9 to 6;1.26. The data come from picture naming and spontaneous speech. Their examination reveals that its emergence lies to segmental, prosodic and phonotactic reasons. More specifically, metathesis helps children avoid specific sequences of consonants by switching them positions. It also assists them to avoid clusters located in unstressed syllables or illicit structures in the ambient language, as complex codas in loanwords. All metathesized segments are located in positions that can occupy according to the rules of Greek. For the data analysis, Optimality Theory is used (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), while we adopt the Multiple Parallel Grammars model (Revithiadou & Tzakosta, 2004) for the two different patterns attested in their speech.

Asymmetries in Infants' Vowel Perception: Changes in Vowel Discrimination in German Learning 6- and 9-Month-Old Infants.

Infants' speech perception is characterized by substantial changes during the first year of life that attune the processing mechanisms to the specific properties of the ambient language. This paper focuses on these developmental changes in vowel perception. More specifically, the emergence and potential cause of perceptual asymmetries in vowel perception are investigated by an experimental study on German 6- and 9-month-olds' discrimination of a vowel contrast that is not phonemic in German. Results show discrimination without any asymmetry in the 6-month-olds but an asymmetrical pattern with better performance when the vowel changes from the less focal to the more focal vowel than vice versa by the 9-month-olds. The results concerning the asymmetries are compatible with the Natural Referent Framework as well as with the Native Language Magnet model. Our results foster two main conclusions. First, bi-directional testing must be mandatory when testing vowel perception. Second, when testing non-native vowel perception, the relation of the stimuli to the native language vowel system has to be considered very carefully as this system impacts the perception of non-native vowels.

Portuguese and German Intonation Contours in a Two-Way Immersion School

This study investigates the intonation contours of neutral yes–no interrogatives produced by simultaneous bilingual children in their two native languages. Previous studies have shown prosodic transfer from one language to another, either from the dominant into the non-dominant language or vice versa, but little is known about what specifically triggers this behaviour. This study explores how bilingual children make use of phonetic–phonological resources while interacting with peers. Three child speakers of German (ambient language) and Portuguese (heritage language) were recorded as they performed a modified version of a map task. Natural and spontaneous data were collected and the speech was analysed. The results indicate that to some degree, bilingual children produce all intonational contours specific to their language variety. When speaking German, they produced the syntax and contour consistent with the structure of yes–no interrogatives in German. When speaking Portuguese, the children displayed variation in their choice of tune, depending on the variety of Portuguese and the language proficiency of their interlocutor. This behaviour is interpreted as prosodic convergence resulting from the high variability of prosodic structures in the different varieties of Portuguese present in the classroom.

Early otitis media puts children at risk for later auditory and language deficits

BackgroundOtitis media is a common disorder of early childhood suspected of hindering auditory and language development, but evidence regarding these effects has been contradictory. To examine potential sources of these contradictory past results and explore in more detail the effects of early otitis media on auditory and language development, three specific hypotheses were tested: (1) Variability in children's general attention could influence results, especially for measures of auditory functioning, leading to spurious findings of group differences; (2) Different language skills may be differentially affected, evoking different effects across studies depending on skills assessed; and (3) Different mechanisms might account for the effects of otitis media on acquisition of different language skills, a finding that would affect treatment choices. MethodChildren 5–10 years old participated: 49 with and 68 without significant histories of otitis media. The auditory function examined was temporal modulation detection, using games designed to maintain children's attention; two additional measures assessed that attention. Measures of lexical knowledge and phonological sensitivity served as the language measures. ResultsSustained attention was demonstrated equally across groups of children with and without histories of otitis media. Children with histories of otitis media performed more poorly than peers without those histories on the auditory measure and on both sets of language measures, but effects were stronger for phonological sensitivity than lexical knowledge. Deficits in temporal modulation detection accounted for variability in phonological sensitivity, but not in lexical knowledge. ConclusionWhen experimental factors are tightly controlled, evidence emerges showing effects of otitis media early in life on both auditory and language development. Mechanism of effects on language acquisition appear to involve both delayed auditory development and diminished access to the ambient language.

I remembered the chorm! Word learning abilities of children with and without phonological impairment.

Children with phonological impairment present with pattern-based errors in their speech production. While some children have difficulties with speech perception and/or the establishment of robust underlying phonological representations, the nature of phonological impairment in children is still not well understood. Given that phonological and lexical development are closely linked, one way to better understand the nature of the problem in phonological impairment is to examine word learning abilities in children. To examine word learning and its relationship with speech perception, speech production and vocabulary knowledge in children aged 4-5 years. There were two variables of interest: speech production abilities ranging from phonological impairment to typical speech; and vocabulary abilities ranging from typical to above average ('lexically precocious'). Participants were 49 Australian-English-speaking children aged 48-69 months. Children were each taught four novel non-words (out of a selection of eight) through stories, and word learning was assessed at 1 week post-initial exposure. Word learning was assessed using two measures: confrontation naming and story retell naming. Data were analysed by group using independent-samples t-tests and Mann-Whitney U-tests, and continuously using multiple linear regression. There was no significant difference in word learning ability of children with and without phonological impairment, but regardless of speech group, children with above average vocabulary had significantly better word learning abilities than children with average vocabulary. In multiple linear regression, vocabulary was the only significant predictor of variance in word learning ability. Children with phonological impairment can be lexically precocious and learn new words like their peers without phonological impairment. Contrary to expectations, vocabulary knowledge rather than expressive phonological ability explained variance in measures of word learning. These findings question an assumption that children with phonological impairment have underspecified phonological representations. They also highlight the heterogeneity among children with phonological impairment and the need to better understand the nature of their difficulty learning the phonological system of the ambient language. What is already known on the subject There is limited research examining the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment. Most previous research focuses on word properties such as phonotactic probability and neighbourhood density. Within the existing literature there are different reports and conclusions regarding the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment and whether their word learning differs from that of children with typically developing speech. What this study adds to existing knowledge This study found that vocabulary was the strongest predictor of word learning across children with and without phonological impairment. There was no significant difference in word learning ability between children with and without phonological impairment. However, children with lexically precocious vocabulary abilities were significantly better at word learning than children with average vocabulary abilities. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Findings from this study support the importance of assessing and considering measures of word learning-including vocabulary-when working with children with phonological impairment. This study indicates that it is possible to use stories coupled with measures of confrontation naming and story retell to gain deeper insight into children's word learning abilities.

The acquisition of the passive voice in Northern East Cree

This article analyzes the acquisition of the passive voice in Northern East (NE) Cree and pays particular attention to the interaction of frequency effects and language-specific cues in the way children form and employ expectations, the process of anticipating oncoming structure in the ambient language. The passive has long been of interest in first-language acquisition, and expectations may play a role in the reported challenges acquiring the passive in languages such as English. We present two studies analyzing approximately 24 hours of naturalistic video recordings involving one adult and two children: Daisy (age 3;08–5;11) and Billy (4;06–5;10). Study 1 examines the passive voice in child-directed speech (CDS). CDS employs passive verbs frequently, at rates much higher than what has been reported for other languages. Passives also typically occur without overt arguments and most often are derived from verbs with two animate participants. Study 2 traces the acquisition of the passive by Daisy and Billy. Daisy demonstrates productivity with all three passive suffixes by age 3;11. Billy’s recordings begin at a later age, and he shows productivity with suffixes -naaniu at 4;06, -ikiwi at 4;10, and -ikiniw at 5;05. Both children produce passives at rates much higher than what has been reported in child speech for other languages. They also most frequently produce passives without overt arguments, and they show no difficulties passivizing verbs with two animate arguments. These results expand the typological purview of passives research and shed additional light on the role of expectations in acquiring the passive voice. The combination of high frequency and particular structural characteristics for the passive voice in Cree CDS allows children to build expectations differing greatly from those of children acquiring languages such as English. In turn, children acquiring NE Cree do not show the same difficulties in acquiring the passive voice.

Danish 20-month-olds' recognition of familiar words with and without consonant and vowel mispronunciations.

Although several studies initially supported the proposal by Nespor et al. (Nespor,Marina, Marcela Peña & Jacques Mehler. 2003. On the different roles of vowels and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition. Lingue e Linguaggio 2. 221-247) that consonants are more informative than vowels in lexical processing, a more complex picture has emerged from recent research. Current evidence suggests that infants initially show a vowel bias in lexical processing and later transition to a consonant bias, possibly depending on the characteristics of the ambient language. Danish infants have shown a vowel bias in word learning at 20months-an age at which infants learning French or Italian no longer show a vowel bias but rather a consonant bias, and infants learning English show no bias. The present study tested whether Danish 20-month-olds also have a vowel bias whenrecognizing familiar words. Specifically, using the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm, we tested whether Danish infants were more likely to ignore or accept consonant than vowel mispronunciations when matching familiar words with pictures. The infants successfully matched correctly pronounced familiar words with pictures but showed no vowel or consonant bias when matching mispronounced words with pictures. The lack of a bias for Danish vowels or consonants in familiar word recognition adds to evidence that lexical processing biases are language-specific and may additionally depend on developmental age and perhaps task difficulty.

Non-verbal predicate negation in child Emirati Arabic

ABSTRACT We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) mub as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) maa, which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by evidence from a longitudinal corpus of six Emirati children. Given the high frequency of occurrence of maa in the ambient language, we show that an input-frequency account predicts maa-mub substitutions in early stages of acquisition. However, confirming previous findings by Becker we show that when mub emerges in later stages, its distribution exhibits an asymmetry: mub is used frequently with individual-level nominal/adjectival predicates but it almost never appears with stage level adjectival/prepositional/ adverbial predicates, mirroring the distribution of copular elements in child English (and other languages).

Learning and change in a dual lexicon model of speech production.

Speech motor processes and phonological forms influence one another because speech and language are acquired and used together. This hypothesis underpins the Computational Core (CC) model, which provides a framework for understanding the limitations of perceptually-driven changes to production. The model assumes a lexicon of motor and perceptual wordforms linked to concepts and whole-word production based on these forms. Motor wordforms are built up with speech practice. Perceptual wordforms encode ambient language patterns in detail. Speech production is the integration of the two forms. Integration results in an output trajectory through perceptual-motor space that guides articulation. Assuming successful communication of the intended concept, the output trajectory is incorporated into the existing motor wordform for that concept. Novel word production exploits existing motor wordforms to define a perceptually-acceptable path through motor space that is further modified by the perceptual wordform during integration. Simulation results show that, by preserving a distinction between motor and perceptual wordforms in the lexicon, the CC model can account for practice-based changes in the production of known words and for the effect of expressive vocabulary size on production accuracy of novel words.

Nominal Compounds in Old English Meter and Prosody

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

Bridging interpersonal and ecological dynamics of cognition through a systems framework of bilingualism.

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual experience that is shaped by social environmental forces, ranging from interpersonal interactions to ambient language exposure. Here, we develop a Systems Framework of Bilingualism, where embedded layers of individual, interpersonal, and ecological sociolinguistic factors jointly predict people's language behavior. Of note, we quantify interpersonal and ecological language dynamics through the novel applications of language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis among 106 English-French bilingual adults in Montréal, Canada. Consistent with a Systems view, we found that people's individual language behavior, on a global level (i.e., overall language use), was jointly predicted by the language characteristics of their interpersonal social networks and the ambient linguistic patterns of their residential neighborhood environments, whereas more granular aspects of language behavior (i.e., word-level proficiency) was mainly driven by local, interpersonal social networks. Together, this work offers a novel theoretical framework, bolstered by innovative analytic techniques to quantify complex social information and empower more holistic assessments of multifaceted human behaviors and cognition, like language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Comparing Word Diversity Versus Amount of Speech in Parents’ Responses to Infants’ Prelinguistic Vocalizations

Our prior research posits that the prelinguistic vocalizations of infants may elicit caregiver speech which is simplified in its linguistic structure. Caregivers’ speech clearly contributes to infants’ development; infants’ communicative and cognitive development are predicted by their ambient language environment. There are at least two sources of variation in infants’ language environment: 1) the number and 2) the diversity of words infants hear. We compare the change in the total number of words (tokens) to the diversity of words against one another. Distributions of words of differing sizes are difficult to compare to one another because the size of the distribution largely determines the word diversity of the distribution. A novel approach to minimizing the challenges of comparing distributions of words is applied to data which were previously reported. We also conducted a new simulation study to estimate the probability that these results are expected by chance. We found that the linguistic structure of caregivers’ responses to infants’ prelinguistic vocalizations has fewer word types as compared to infant-directed but noncontingent speech. Our new method shows that contingent word distributions remain simplified as the number of total words sampled increases. By vocalizing, infants elicit caregiver speech, which is simpler in structure and may be easier to learn.