Early Vocabularies Research Articles

The role of vision in the acquisition of words: Vocabulary development in blind toddlers.

What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N=40, Mean age=24months [R: 7-57months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N=6574). We found that on average, blind children showed a roughly half-year vocabulary delay relative to sighted children, amid considerable variability. However, the content of blind and sighted children's vocabulary was statistically indistinguishable in word length, part of speech, semantic category, concreteness, interactiveness, and perceptual modality. At a finer-grained level, we also found that words' perceptual properties intersect with children's perceptual abilities. Our findings suggest that while an absence of visual input may initially make vocabulary development more difficult, the content of the early productive vocabulary is largely resilient to differences in perceptual access. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Infants and toddlers born blind (with no other diagnoses) show a 7.5 month productive vocabulary delay on average, with wide variability. Across the studied age range (7-57months), vocabulary delays widened with age. Blind and sighted children's early vocabularies contain similar distributions of word lengths, parts of speech, semantic categories, and perceptual modalities. Blind children (but not sighted children) were more likely to say visual words which could also be experienced through other senses.

Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech

This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multiple methods and across a diverse collection of language populations. However, past evidence bearing on a noun bias in Tseltal learners has been mixed. Tseltal grammatical features and child–caregiver interactional patterns dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs, leading to the prediction of a diminished noun bias and perhaps even an early predominance of verbs. We here analyze the use of noun and verb stems in children’s spontaneous speech from egocentric daylong recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 and 4;4. We find weak to no evidence for a noun bias using two separate analytical approaches on the same data; one analysis yields a preliminary suggestion of a flipped outcome (i.e. a verb bias). We discuss the implications of these findings for broader theories of learning bias in early lexical development.

Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Words and the Receptive-Expressive Gap in Autistic and Non-Autistic Children.

The goal of this work was to examine the semantic and syntactic properties of the vocabularies of autistic and non-autistic infants and toddlers to see if children in these two groups know different kinds of words. We focused on both receptive and expressive vocabularies. For expressive vocabulary, we looked only at the "active" lexicon: Of those words that are already in children's receptive vocabulary, we asked which ones they also produce. We used an existing data set of 346 parent report vocabulary checklists (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures) from 41 autistic and 27 non-autistic children at multiple timepoints between the ages of 6 and 43 months. We coded the words on the checklists for various semantic and syntactic properties and evaluated which properties predicted whether children understood and produced those words. Overall, we replicated a common finding that autistic children have smaller receptive vocabularies than non-autistic children, but we found that of the words they understand, autistic children produce a similar proportion of those words as non-autistic children. While we found that some syntactic properties are more or less likely to be represented in children's early vocabularies (e.g., nouns are more likely to be understood and produced than words that are not nouns), these patterns did not differ across autistic and non-autistic children. The semantic and syntactic compositions of autistic and non-autistic children's vocabularies are similar. Thus, while receptive vocabularies are relatively smaller for autistic children, they do not appear to have specific difficulty with words that have particular syntactic or semantic properties, or with adding words to the expressive vocabulary that they already understand.

Extra-linguistic modulation of the English noun-bias: evidence from Malaysian bilingual infants and toddlers

Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is specific to the language itself, or that extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structures. To address this debate, the present study compares the relative distribution of verbs and nouns within the same language—English—between Malay–English and Mandarin–English bilingual infants and toddlers. The English receptive lexicons of Mandarin–English bilingual children contained more verbs than those of Malay–English bilinguals, suggesting that the noun-bias is modulated by factors external to English. We discuss the potential role of socio-cultural differences on the composition of children early vocabularies.

Perceptual Connectivity Influences Toddlers’ Attention to Known Objects and Subsequent Label Processing

While recent research suggests that toddlers tend to learn word meanings with many “perceptual” features that are accessible to the toddler’s sensory perception, it is not clear whether and how building a lexicon with perceptual connectivity supports attention to and recognition of word meanings. We explore this question in 24–30-month-olds (N = 60) in relation to other individual differences, including age, vocabulary size, and tendencies to maintain focused attention. Participants’ looking to item pairs with high vs. low perceptual connectivity—defined as the number of words in a child’s lexicon sharing perceptual features with the item—was measured before and after target item labeling. Results revealed pre-labeling attention to known items is biased to both high- and low-connectivity items: first to high, and second, but more robustly, to low-connectivity items. Subsequent object–label processing was also facilitated for high-connectivity items, particularly for children with temperamental tendencies to maintain focused attention. This work provides the first empirical evidence that patterns of shared perceptual features within children’s known vocabularies influence both visual and lexical processing, highlighting the potential for a newfound set of developmental dependencies based on the perceptual/sensory structure of early vocabularies.

Tell me where it is: Selective difficulties in spatial language on the autism spectrum.

Proficient use of spatial terms such as under, to the left of or in front of is a central component of daily communication and is important in the development of language and spatial cognition. Here we examine spatial language abilities in intellectually high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorder, an area previously overlooked in autism research. Twenty-five high-functioning individuals with ASD and 25 typically developing controls, matched for chronological age and cognitive abilities, completed a novel battery tapping a broad range of spatial language abilities. We report selective difficulties in the production of spatial terms and spatial description recall in high-functioning ASD. Overall verbal abilities did not account for the observed group differences. Crucially, however, the intensity of autism spectrum traits predicted individual performance in both spatial language production and spatial description recall. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and explore their significance for both clinical practice and intervention.Lay abstractHow we think and talk about space is an essential ability, necessary for understanding the world around us. We recruit spatial thinking every day when finding our way or using tools but also in more advanced tasks, such as reading complex graphs or maps. We do so also in daily communication when we use spatial language, terms such as under, over, to the left of or in front of, and when we give instructions. Spatial terms appear in children’s early vocabularies and continue to develop until late childhood or even early adolescence. Because spatial language develops over many years, some spatial terms are mastered very early, whereas others take longer to acquire. In the current set of studies, we tested how intellectually high-functioning children and adults on the autism spectrum use and understand these early- and late-acquired spatial terms in comparison to typically developing age-matched individuals. We found that children and adults on the autism spectrum experience difficulties with the use of some spatial terms (e.g. near and far or out of and down off) but not with others, which are acquired early (e.g. in and on or over and under). We also found that remembering spatial terms from short stories was more difficult for the individuals on the autism spectrum compared with typically developing individuals. These results reveal difficulties that can profoundly affect everyday communication of children and adults on the autism spectrum but also open new directions of research on language development in autism spectrum disorders.

The ASL-CDI 2.0: An updated, normed adaptation of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language.

Vocabulary is a critical early marker of language development. The MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory has been adapted to dozens of languages, and provides a bird's-eye view of children's early vocabularies which can be informative for both research and clinical purposes. We present an update to the American Sign Language Communicative Development Inventory (the ASL-CDI 2.0, https://www.aslcdi.org ), a normed assessment of early ASL vocabulary that can be widely administered online by individuals with no formal training in sign language linguistics. The ASL-CDI 2.0 includes receptive and expressive vocabulary, and a Gestures and Phrases section; it also introduces an online interface that presents ASL signs as videos. We validated the ASL-CDI 2.0 with expressive and receptive in-person tasks administered to a subset of participants. The norming sample presented here consists of 120 deaf children (ages 9 to 73 months) with deaf parents. We present an analysis of the measurement properties of the ASL-CDI 2.0. Vocabulary increases with age, as expected. We see an early noun bias that shifts with age, and a lag between receptive and expressive vocabulary. We present these findings with indications for how the ASL-CDI 2.0 may be used in a range of clinical and research settings.

Degree and not type of iconicity affects sign language vocabulary acquisition.

Lexical iconicity-signs or words that resemble their meaning-is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be more readily learned than other types of iconic signs. Alternatively, the structure mapping theory of iconicity predicts that learners are sensitive to the amount of overlap between form and meaning. In this exploratory study of early vocabulary development in American Sign Language (ASL), we asked whether type of iconicity predicts sign acquisition above and beyond degree of iconicity. We also controlled for concreteness and relevance to babies, two possible confounding factors. Highly concrete referents and concepts that are germane to babies may be amenable to iconic mappings. We reanalyzed a previously published set of ASL Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) reports from 58 deaf children learning ASL from their deaf parents (Anderson & Reilly, 2002). Pantomimic signs were more iconic than other types of iconic signs (perceptual, both pantomimic and perceptual, or arbitrary), but type of iconicity had no effect on acquisition. Children may not make use of the special status of pantomimic elements of signs. Their vocabularies are, however, shaped by degree of iconicity, which aligns with a structure mapping theory of iconicity, though other explanations are also compatible (e.g., iconicity in child-directed signing). Previously demonstrated effects of type of iconicity may be an artifact of the increased degree of iconicity among pantomimic signs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-generated variability in object images predicts vocabulary growth.

Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide the first evidence that image-level object variability matters and may be the link that connects infant object manipulation to vocabulary development. Using head-mounted eye tracking, the present study objectively measured individual differences in the moment-to-moment variability of visual instances of the same object, from infants' first-person views. Infants who generated more variable visual object images through manual object manipulation at 15months of age experienced greater vocabulary growth over the next six months. Elucidating infants' everyday visual experiences with objects may constitute a crucial missing link in our understanding of the developmental trajectory of object name learning.

Are Homophones Acoustically Distinguished in Child-Directed Speech?

ABSTRACTMany approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children’s early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl, 2008). Such differences have not yet been documented in children’s natural language experience and the exaggerated prosody of child-directed speech could either mask the subtle distinctions reported in adult-directed speech or enhance them. This study measured the duration, vowel characteristics, and pitch information of homophone tokens taken from a corpus of child-directed speech. The results show that homophone meanings are acoustically distinct in child-directed speech as a function of lemma frequency, particularly in utterance-final positions. Such distinctions may allow children to maintain separate phonetic representations of homophones until their cognitive and linguistic abilities are robust to violations of the one-to-one bias.

The Composition of Early Vocabulary in Spanish Children With Down Syndrome and Their Peers With Typical Development.

There are very few studies, and at present none in Spanish, on vocabulary composition in children with Down syndrome (DS). Nor has the topic been widely assessed in Spanish-speaking children with typical development (TD). This study analyzed the composition of early vocabularies in a large sample of Spanish-speaking children with DS and compared it with that of children with TD. We studied 108 children with DS and 108 children with TD with mental ages between 8 and 29 months, matched for size of productive vocabulary and gender. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1993, 2007), adapted to the language development profile of children with DS, were used. The categories examined were nouns, predicates, closed-class words, and social words. The performance of children with DS was similar to that of children with TD with the same vocabulary size. The only significant difference was the larger production of nouns by children with DS. The trends of development in the different classes of words were also similar. The strategies used by children with DS to learn vocabulary may be similar to those used by children with TD in the first stages of language learning.

Early gesture, early vocabulary, and risk of language impairment in preschoolers

BackgroundGesture precedes vocabulary development and may be an early marker of later language impairment. AimsUsing data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this study examined the contribution of children’s (N=1064) early gestures and early vocabularies to their risk of language impairment in preschool years. Methods and proceduresAt age 15 months, maternal reports on children’s use of gestures and vocabulary comprehension and production skills were measured using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. At age 3 and 4.5 years, children’s language skills were assessed using the Reynell Developmental Language Scale and Preschool Language Scale-3, respectively. Outcomes and resultsAfter controlling for child, maternal, and family sociodemographic factors, children at later risk for language impairment were found to exhibit significantly less early gesture use and vocabulary skills relative to their typically developing peers. Early use of gestures was also significantly correlated with early vocabulary skills. Conclusions and implicationsThe effect of early gesture on children’s later risk of language impairment was indirect and mediated by early vocabulary production. Early gesture may have the potential to serve as an early diagnostic tool and play a role in early intervention.

Shared understanding and idiosyncratic expression in early vocabularies

To what extent do toddlers have shared vocabularies? We examined CDI data collected from 14,607 infants and toddlers in five countries and measured the amount of variability between individual lexicons during development for both comprehension and production. Early lexicons are highly overlapping. However, beyond 100 words, toddlers share more words with other toddlers in comprehension than in production, even when matched for lexicon sizes. This finding points to a structural difference in early comprehension and production: Toddlers are generalists in comprehension but develop a unique, expressive voice. Variability in production decreases after two years of age, suggesting convergence to a common expressive core vocabulary. We discuss potential exogenous and endogenous contributions to the inverted U-shaped development observed in young children's expressive lexical variability.

It's Taking Shape: Shared Object Features Influence Novel Noun Generalizations

Children's early noun vocabularies are dominated by names for shape‐based categories. However, along with shape, material and colour are also important features of many early categories. In the current study, we investigate how the number of shared features among objects influences children's novel noun generalizations, explanations for these generalizations and spontaneous speech. Preschool children and adults were presented with test objects that shared only one feature (e.g. shape) or that shared two features (e.g. material and colour). After each trial, participants were asked, ‘how did you know that was your [novel name]?’ Overall, participants generalized novel names on the basis of shape more when objects shared shape and a second feature with the exemplar. All participants provided shape‐based explanations of their choices, but explanations were increasingly more abstract across development. Finally, children's spontaneous speech was dominated by references to the objects' shape, and this did not change across development or number of shared features. Overall, these data demonstrate that the shape bias is enhanced when objects share shape and a second feature but weakened for 3‐year‐old children when objects share two non‐shape features. These findings have implications for our understanding of how children learn names for objects that belong to multiple categories. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Innovative Approach to the Study of Word Learning Biases

A key question of development is how children detect structure in the environ-ment and use that structure to guide future learning. This is a question of particular interest to researchers inves-tigating language and category develop-ment. There is now an extensive body of research demonstrating that the dif-ficulty of first language acquisition and generalization is alleviated by a variety of word learning biases and constraints children may employ (e.g., Landau et al., 1988; Markman, 1989, 1992; Merriman et produce differences in in-the-moment al., 1989; Waxman and Kosowski, 1990). Perry and Samuelson (2011) focus on one of the most recently studied and well-documented biases, the “shape bias.” However, in contrast to the ways in which cognitive developmentalists have traditionally investigated this bias, Perry and Samuelson adopt a new approach, focusing on how individual differences in children’s vocabulary structure guide online attention during novel noun generalization.The shape bias refers to children’s ten-dency to extend object labels on the basis of similarity in shape rather than size, color, or material. Previous research has focused on how the size and structure of children’s noun vocabulary, particularly the number of words children produce labeling categories organized by similar-ity in shape or material, relate to shape bias development (e.g., Samuelson and Smith, 1999). With very few exceptions (e.g., Gershkoff-Stowe and Smith, 2004 ), this research has also focused entirely on children’s performance as a group. In marked contrast, Perry and Samuelson (2011) introduce a novel approach to studying word learning biases by focus-ing on individual differences in children’s vocabulary development and employ-ing an innovative measure of children’s vocabulary structure: “against the system” nouns.According to Perry and Samuelson (2011), “against the system” nouns derive their name from their inability to be classified on only one side of the ontological divide between categories defined by shape (solid + shape + count) and categories defined by material (non-solid + material + mass). Perry and Samuelson demonstrate that the size of individual children’s “against the system” vocabulary is a key predictor of individual children’s shape bias, more so than tradi-tional measures of children’s vocabulary for objects defined by shape or material. In doing so, they provide strong support for the role of prior learning in shaping future learning, and illustrate how online attention may be an important factor mediating this relation.Where do individual differences in young children’s vocabularies originate? Factors such as gender and exposure to speech have been found to contribute to individual differences in children’s rate of vocabulary growth (e.g., Huttenlocher et al., 1991). However, it is not yet known whether these or other factors may also contribute to differences in early vocabu-lary structure. In all likelihood, there are a host of factors leading to the individual differences observed in the early stages of children’s word learning, including charac-teristics of the child (e.g., gender, activity level, learning capacity) as well as charac-teristics of the caregiver (e.g., level of inter -action with the child) and of the physical environment (e.g., exposure to particular objects and people). Critically, however, Perry and Samuelson’s (2011) data suggest that the key to understanding early indi-vidual differences in vocabulary structure may lie not in examining such factors in isolation, but in considering the role each such factor may play in shaping children’s early attentional biases. For just as indi-vidual differences in vocabulary structure influence children’s noun generalization and attentional biases, it is probable that initial and/or prelinguistic attentional biases play a key role in the acquisition of children’s varied early vocabularies. Future research should address such initial atten-tional biases and how they may influence early word learning as well as later atten-tional biases.Perry and Samuelson (2011) introduce an exciting new way of conceptualizing and investigating children’s language and cat-egory development that has far-reaching applications for developmental science. By this account, the key questions involve how prior experiences with language, objects, and people work together to guide attention and how individual differences in attention learning. Approaching development from this perspective will push the field forward in answering questions about how the structure of the child’s environment relates not only to the development of word learn-ing biases, but also to thinking and learning more broadly.

The 1930s, Photography, and Virginia Woolf's Flush

By the early 1930s modernist vocabularies were being shaped by new photographic strategies of montage, close-ups, unusual viewpoints, and sharp tonal contrasts. The new style was conspicuously urban both in subject matter and imagery. Yet Virginia Woolf's key urban novel of the early 1930s—Flush—is rarely considered in relation to the ubiquity of modernist visual photography. Virginia Woolf, however, like many other modernist writers, was an experienced amateur photographer, owning in succession Frenas, vest-pocket Kodaks, and, in 1931, a Zeiss camera. The Woolfs took more than 1,000 domestic photographs and, willingly or unwillingly, Woolf was the subject of many professional photographs. This article analyzes Flush's use of photographic tropes and the use of photography in Woolf's companion works “Aurora Leigh,” “The Cinema,” and Three Guineas in terms of modernist photography and Woolf's specific camera expertise. By demonstrating the significance of the visual in a text usually praised for its olfactory sensuality, the article aims to demonstrate the impact of photography on modernist writing.

Lexical mixing in the early productive vocabularies of Maltese children: Implications for intervention

Since norms for vocabulary acquisition in Maltese children do not yet exist, documentation of productive vocabulary acquisition may contribute to establishing a baseline of lexical development. Clinical implications may thus be derived. The current study is a small‐scale investigation of the proportions of Maltese and English lexemes in the vocabularies of ten normally‐developing Maltese children aged between 12 and 30 months. The participants were primarily exposed to Maltese within their immediate environments, while receiving indirect exposure to English. Outcomes of parental report and language sampling were analysed for evidence of a bilingual dimension in these children's productive vocabularies. Translation equivalents were reported on by parents, but negligible evidence of equivalents emerged in conversational language use. In contrast, lexical borrowings were both reported and sampled. A substantial proportion of English lexemes were reported by the parents in the absence of Maltese equivalents.

Why Nouns Trump Verbs in Word Learning: New Evidence from Children and Adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm

Despite tremendous cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in linguistic input, early vocabularies are dominated by nouns. One explanation for this pattern appeals to the conceptual capacity of the learner—nouns predominate because the concepts to which they refer are somehow simpler or more accessible to young learners than the concepts to which verbs refer. Evidence for this viewpoint has come primarily from infants and toddlers. Another explanation appeals to the linguistic requirements underlying word learning—nouns predominate because their acquisition is well-supported by observation, while verbs often depend on additional linguistic information which early word learners are not yet able to utilize. Evidence for this viewpoint has thus far come primarily from adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP). To bridge this gap, we modified the HSP task to accommodate children. Although children's approach to this task differed markedly from that of adults, their patterns of performance were strikingly similar. Given observation alone, 7-year-olds—like adults—identified nouns more successfully than verbs. When observation was supplemented with linguistic information, 7-year-olds successfully recruited this information to identify verbs. This outcome represents the first empirical demonstration that young children's noun advantage may be attributable, at least in part, to the distinct linguistic requirements underlying the acquisition of nouns and verbs.

Early Intervention in Children with Cleft Palate

Early Intervention in Children with Cleft Palate

Finding words in a sea of speech

Discriminating the words from normal connected speech is a notoriously difficult task; there are no known cues that act, as the white spaces on a page do, to separate individual words from each other. Nevertheless, infants must find the words to ensure the process of language acquisition and, in fact, they do so well before their first birthday. How do they do it? Two recent papers offer two very different insights into early word segmentation and identification. The first, by Saffran 1xWords in a sea of sounds: the output of infant statistical learning. Saffran, J.R. Cognition. 2001; 81: 149–169Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (134)See all References1, extends her previous work that demonstrated infants’ impressive abilities to extract nonsense tri-syllabic ‘words’ from a stream of continuous speech. The present study asks whether infants are treating these nonsense items as potential words or simply as identifiable but irrelevant patterns. In other words, do Saffran and colleagues’ results address the linguistic problem of word segmentation? Infants in this study were habituated, as in previous studies, to a continuous stream of nonsense syllables. In this stream, some tri-syllables appeared consistently as a unit whereas others did not appear as a coherent chunk; this formed the difference between the so-called ‘words’ and non-words. In one of the crucial test conditions, the nonsense words and non-words were embedded either in an English carrier phrase (e.g. ‘I like my pabiku’) or in a matched nonsense carrier phrase (e.g. ‘Zy fike ny pabiku’). The results showed that 8-month-old infants could still discriminate between the nonsense words and non-words, but only with the English carrier phrases and not the nonsense ones. Saffran argues that the statistical segmentation processes that are tapped in this task give rise to words that are indeed integrated into the larger acquisition process.In the second article, Brent and Siskind 2xThe role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Brent, M.R. and Siskind, J.M. Cognition. 2001; 81: B33–B44Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (164)See all References2 demonstrate the power and availability of unconnected speech in the form of isolated words. Isolated words were defined as words occurring with at least 300 ms of silence on either side – in effect, words with a reasonable equivalent of acoustic white space around them. They collected speech samples in a very naturalistic setting from parents with children aged between 9 and 21 months (mothers were given recording equipment to use at home). Analysis of the parents’ speech showed that they reliably used a variety of distinct words in isolation, according to the specified criterion. More importantly, the children's own early vocabularies (as well as later word knowledge) reflected the words they had heard most frequently in isolation. Conventional wisdom has long held that isolated words would be a helpful entry point to the word and language acquisition process. Brent and Siskind have supported this conventional view (children do acquire isolated words early, and well) and moreover, they have shown that in at least some cultures (middle class American in this case), isolated words are indeed present in sufficient quantity and variety in the input to make the conventional story plausible.Taken together, these studies show us that young infants are very adept at finding real words in an unforgiving stream of continuous speech, and that in some cases, the input speech might not be so unforgiving as it first appears.