Lexical Acquisition Research Articles

Reviewing some similarities and differences in L1 and L2 lexical development

This paper reviews the literature on similarities and differences between first and second language lexical acquisition. After a brief discussion of differences in input, we go on to early lexical development, considering both the speed of acquisition as well as possible reasons for more efficient lexical learning in first language acquisition as compared to second language acquisition. We discuss the role of phonological representations in facilitating the extraction of units from incoming speech. We continue with a discussion of unanalysed units, arguing that their role as a stepping stone into language is much the same in first and second language acquisition. Finally, we review methods for investigating the first and second language lexicons.

Précis ofSemantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach

AbstractIn this précis of our recent book,Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach(Rogers & McClelland 2004), we present a parallel distributed processing theory of the acquisition, representation, and use of human semantic knowledge. The theory proposes that semantic abilities arise from the flow of activation among simple, neuron-like processing units, as governed by the strengths of interconnecting weights; and that acquisition of new semantic information involves the gradual adjustment of weights in the system in response to experience. These simple ideas explain a wide range of empirical phenomena from studies of categorization, lexical acquisition, and disordered semantic cognition. In this précis we focus on phenomena central to the reaction against similarity-based theories that arose in the 1980s and that subsequently motivated the “theory-theory” approach to semantic knowledge. Specifically, we consider (1) how concepts differentiate in early development, (2) why some groupings of items seem to form “good” or coherent categories while others do not, (3) why different properties seem central or important to different concepts, (4) why children and adults sometimes attest to beliefs that seem to contradict their direct experience, (5) how concepts reorganize between the ages of 4 and 10, and (6) the relationship between causal knowledge and semantic knowledge. The explanations our theory offers for these phenomena are illustrated with reference to a simple feed-forward connectionist model. The relationships between this simple model, the broader theory, and more general issues in cognitive science are discussed.

A cost-effective lexical acquisition process for large-scale thesaurus translation

Thesauri and controlled vocabularies facilitate access to digital collections by explicitly representing the underlying principles of organization. Translation of such resources into multiple languages is an important component for providing multilingual access. However, the specificity of vocabulary terms in most thesauri precludes fully-automatic translation using general-domain lexical resources. In this paper, we present an efficient process for leveraging human translations to construct domain-specific lexical resources. This process is illustrated on a thesaurus of 56,000 concepts used to catalog a large archive of oral histories. We elicited human translations on a small subset of concepts, induced a probabilistic phrase dictionary from these translations, and used the resulting resource to automatically translate the rest of the thesaurus. Two separate evaluations demonstrate the acceptability of the automatic translations and the cost-effectiveness of our approach.

Semantic involvement in reading aloud: Evidence from a nonword training study.

The current research uses a novel methodology to examine the role of semantics in reading aloud. Participants were trained to read aloud 2 sets of novel words (i.e., nonwords such as bink): some with meanings (semantic) and some without (nonsemantic). A comparison of reading aloud performance between these 2 sets of novel words was used to provide an indicator of the importance of semantic information in reading aloud. In Experiment 1, in contrast to expectations, reading aloud performance was not better for novel words in the semantic condition. In Experiment 2, the training of novel words was modified to reflect more realistic steps of lexical acquisition: Reading aloud performance became faster and more accurate for novel words in the semantic condition, but only for novel words with inconsistent pronunciations. This semantic advantage for inconsistent novel words was again observed when a subset of participants from Experiment 2 was retested 6-12 months later (in Experiment 3). These findings provide support for a limited but significant role for semantics in the reading aloud process.

The structure and nature of phonological neighbourhoods in children's early lexicons

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on children's earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours as in pin/bin), vowel position (consonant neighbours as in pin/pan/) and word-offset position (lead neighbours as in pin/pit). Results indicated that neighbours in children's early lexicons are significantly more often distinguished in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours) and significantly less often distinguished in word-offset position (lead neighbours). Moreover, patterns in child language are more extreme than in the target language. Findings are discussed within the PRIMIR framework (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interaction Representations; Werker & Curtin, 2005). It is argued that early perceptual sensitivity aids lexical acquisition, supporting continuity across speech perception and lexical acquisition.

Chinese pronominal anaphora resolution using lexical knowledge and entropy‐based weight

AbstractPronominal anaphors are commonly observed in written texts. In this article, effective Chinese pronominal anaphora resolution is addressed by using lexical knowledge acquisition and salience measurement. The lexical knowledge acquisition is aimed to extract more semantic features, such as gender, number, and collocate compatibility by employing multiple resources. The presented salience measurement is based on entropy‐based weighting on selecting antecedent candidates. The resolution is justified with a real corpus and compared with a rule‐based model. Experimental results by five‐fold cross‐validation show that our approach yields 82.5% success rate on 1343 anaphoric instances. In comparison with a general rule‐based approach, the performance is improved by 7%.

The Role of Paradigm Formation in Lexical Acquisition: Towards a Unified Account of Overgeneralization and Transfer Effects

This article argues for a theory of lexical acquisition that takes overgeneralization in monolinguals and syntactic transfer effects in bilinguals to be manifestations of the same underlying mechanism. The theory views both overgeneralization and transfer as epiphenomena of an updating system which spreads newly acquired information across paradigms. A consequence of this setup is that both overgeneralization and transfer effects are only expected to affect members of the same lexical paradigm. Experimental evidence, both old and new, is presented in support of this model.

Automatic discovery of topics and acoustic morphemes from speech

This work deals with automatic lexical acquisition and topic discovery from a speech stream. The proposed algorithm builds a lexicon enriched with topic information in three steps: transcription of an audio stream into phone sequences with a speaker- and task-independent phone recogniser, automatic lexical acquisition based on approximate string matching, and hierarchical topic clustering of the lexical entries based on a knowledge-poor co-occurrence approach. The resulting semantic lexicon is then used to automatically cluster the incoming speech stream into topics. The main advantages of this algorithm are its very low computational requirements and its independence to pre-defined linguistic resources, which makes it easy to port to new languages and to adapt to new tasks. It is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively on two corpora and on two tasks related to topic clustering. The results of these evaluations are encouraging and outline future directions of research for the proposed algorithm, such as building automatic orthographic labels of the lexical items.

Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results that test the plausibility of this hypothesis. These results are tied together within a model of the architecture of the first stages of language processing, and their acquisition.

A Statistical Associative Account of Vocabulary Growth in Early Word Learning

There are an infinite number of possible word-to-world pairings. One way children could learn words at an early stage is by computing statistical regularities across different modalities—pairing spoken words with possible referents in the co-occurring extralinguistic environment, collecting a number of such pairs, and then figuring out the common elements. This paper provides computational evidence that such a statistical mechanism is possible for object name learning. Moreover, young children learn words much more effectively and efficiently at later stages. Could statistical learning account for this behavioral change? The current paper explores this question by presenting a developmental model of word learning that relies on a general associative mechanism and recruits previously learned words to guide subsequent word learning. This mechanism leads to increasingly fast learning and corresponding behavioral changes. Simulation studies are conducted using the data collected from a series of picture-book reading episodes wherein parents were asked to narrate books to their 20-month-old children. The results show that previously learned lexical knowledge can narrow the search space and therefore reduce the degree of ambiguity in word-to-world mappings. This results in the bootstrapping of lexical acquisition without changing the underlying statistical learning mechanism. Hence, this work suggests that using lexical knowledge accumulated in prior statistical learning could play an important role in vocabulary growth. To our knowledge, this is the first model that attempts to simulate the effects of cumulative knowledge on subsequent learning using realistic data collected from child-caregiver interactions.

Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language

ABSTRACTThe English second language development of 19 children (mean age at outset = 5 years, 4 months) from various first language backgrounds was examined every 6 months for 2 years, using spontaneous language sampling, parental questionnaires, and a standardized receptive vocabulary test. Results showed that the children's mean mental age equivalency and standard scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition nearly met native-speaker expectations after an average of 34 months of exposure to English, a faster rate of development than has been reported in some other research. Children displayed the phenomenon of general all-purpose verbs through overextension of the semantically flexible verb do, an indicator of having to stretch their lexical resources for the communicative context. Regarding sources of individual differences, older age of second language onset and higher levels of mother's education were associated with faster growth in children's English lexical development, and nonverbal intelligence showed some limited influence on vocabulary outcomes; however, English use in the home had no consistent effects on vocabulary development.

顕著性に基づくロボットの能動的語彙獲得

Observational studies of human infants tell us that they can successfully acquire lexicon and that the relationship between the meaning and the uttered word can be understood from only one teaching session by a caregiver, even though there are many other possible mappings. This paper proposes a lexical acquisition model that makes use of curiosity to associate visual features of observed objects with the labels that are uttered by a caregiver. A robot changes its attention and learning rate based on the curiosity. In experiments with a humanoid robot, the visual features are represented using self-organizing maps that adaptively represent the shape of the observed objects independent of viewpoint.

The count-mass distinction in typically developing and grammatically specifically language impaired children: New evidence on the role of syntax and semantics

By the age of three, typically developing children can draw conceptual distinctions between “kinds of individual” and “kinds of stuff” on the basis of syntactic structures. They differ from adults only in the extent to which syntactic knowledge can be over-ridden by semantic properties of the referent. However, the relative roles of syntax and semantics in determining the nature of the count-mass distinction in language acquisition are still not well-understood. This paper contributes to this debate by studying novel noun acquisition in a subgroup of children, aged 8–15 years, with specific language impairment, whose core deficits are limited to within the grammatical system (G-SLI), We conducted two experiments: a production task and a word extension task. Such children might be expected to rely to a greater extent than their age-matched peers on semantic properties of referents in order to assign noun interpretations, since by hypothesis they have greater difficulty in accessing and utilizing syntactic category distinctions than typically developing children. In the production task, the Children with G-SLI demonstrated rigid over-application of a pluralization rule which masked even basic knowledge of semantic information about individuated objects versus non-individuated substances. Age-matched control children only performed in this way when all syntactic and conceptual/perceptual cues were neutralized. In the word extension task, which required a non-verbal response, the Children with G-SLI showed evidence of only very limited abilities to use syntactic or semantic information for word-learning. Thus, developmental deficits in the grammatical system can be seen to impact on lexical acquisition as well as syntactic development. Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, the reader will be able to: (1) describe how syntactic (grammatical) impairment affects the ability to use syntactic cues for lexical acquisition, resulting in difficulties representing the structure of even simple phrases; (2) discuss the interaction between language components throughout development, and the cumulative impact of impairment in one or more aspect of language, which results in secondary impairments in other parts of the system; (3) consider the effects of an impairment in the ability to use syntactic cues for narrowing down word meanings, and how this can result in a much bigger problem affecting the subtle semantics of words and word classes.

Support for hybrid models of the age of acquisition of English nouns

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic construct that refers to the chronological age at which a given word is acquired. Contemporary theories of AoA have focused on lexical acquisition with respect to either the developing phonological or semantic systems. One way of testing the relative dominance of phonological or semantic contributions is through open-source psycholinguistic databases, whereby AoA may be correlated with other variables (e.g., morphology, semantics, phonology). We report two multiple regression analyses conducted on a corpus of English nouns with, respectively, subjective and objective AoA measures as the dependent variables and a combination of 10 predictors, including 2 semantic, 4 phonological, 2 morphological, and 2 lexical. This multivariate combination of predictors accounted for significant proportions of the variance ofAoA in both analyses. We argue that this evidence supports hybrid models of language development that integrate multiple levels of processing-from sound to meaning.

Production facilitates lexical acquisition in young children

Recent research in language acquisition argues that production plays a unique role in the acquisition of phonological and lexical representations [Fikkert. In press, LabPhonX]. In this research, we investigate the effect of production in early lexical acquisition. Twenty Dutch-learning children participated in a word-learning task, where children were taught and asked to imitate non-words. Children were then tested on their recall of the non-words, and their receptive knowledge of the non-words. Children’s performance on the two tasks was compared to whether they imitated the non-words during training, the number of times they imitated the non-words, and the accuracy of their imitations. While no effect of production during training was found on children’s receptive knowledge of the non-words, production during training was associated with children’s ability to recall the non-words. Specifically, children who produced the non-words during training were more likely to recall the non-words at test. No relationship was found between the number of times children produced the non-words during training, or the accuracy of their imitations. These results indicate that production enhances early lexical acquisition, and suggests a unique role for articulation in the formation of phonological and lexical representations.

Similarities and variation in noun and verb acquisition: A crosslinguistic study of children learning German, Korean, and Turkish

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and the saliency of nouns and verbs, crosslinguistic differences in acquisition were expected. Second, in the light of conceptual differences between the basic categories of nouns and verbs, category-specific effects were also expected. Of the children who participated in a naming study, 240 were German, 240 Korean, and 60 Turkish; 233 German and 99 additional German and Korean children were tested with a word-comprehension task. The target items were 36 nouns and 36 verbs, adapted for the three languages. The results are interpreted as evidence for both language-general tendencies and language-specific influences. Although the children were mostly better at processing nouns than verbs, the extent of this discrepancy differed across languages. The results also indicate more crosslinguistic variance in the case of nouns than in the case of verbs. The findings are discussed with respect to structural characteristics of the languages, developmental patterns in lexical acquisition, and characteristics of the task.

Partial Lexical Knowledge in Tests of Incidental Vocabulary Learning from L2 Reading

Abstract: This analysis evaluates the receptive tests of targeted lexical knowledge in the written medium, which are typically used in empirical research into lexical acquisition from reading foreign/second language texts. Apart from the types of second language cues or prompts, and the language of the responses, the main issues revolve around: (a) the recognition of partial knowledge, (b) the categorization of different subject responses, in closed and open formats, and (c) their quantification. Variations in response categorizations are questioned in particular on partial lexical knowledge, the capacity for multiple choice formats to cope with partial and correct knowledge, and the conversions of nominal scales to equal interval numerical scales.

Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning

Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “it's pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen matching the novel verb. Infants correctly pointed more often towards the familiar action. To check that they did not simply perseverate in pointing at the familiar scene, control infants were taught novel nouns on the same visual stimuli (e.g. “un poune est là”/ “a poon is here”). Contrary to verb-learning infants, noun-learning infants pointed more often to the novel action. These results confirm the hypothesis that function words, and more generally syntactic structure, support early lexical acquisition.

Defusing the Childhood Vocabulary Explosion

During the second year of life, the rate at which children acquire new words accelerates dramatically. This has led the field of language acquisition to posit specialized mechanisms that leverage the few words learned in the initial slow phase for faster vocabulary growth later. Simulations and mathematical analysis demonstrate that specialized cognitive changes are unnecessary. The acceleration in lexical acquisition is a necessary by-product of learning if (i) multiple words are learned in parallel and (ii) words are distributed such that there are few words that can be acquired quickly and many difficult ones.

Automatically learning semantic knowledge about multiword predicates

Highly frequent and highly polysemous verbs, such as give, take, and make, pose a challenge to automatic lexical acquisition methods. These verbs widely participate in multiword predicates (such as light verb constructions, or LVCs), in which they contribute a broad range of figurative meanings that must be recognized. Here we focus on two properties that are key to the computational treatment of LVCs. First, we consider the degree of figurativeness of the semantic contribution of such a verb to the various LVCs it participates in. Second, we explore the patterns of acceptability of LVCs, and their productivity over semantically related combinations. To assess these properties, we develop statistical measures of figurativeness and acceptability that draw on linguistic properties of LVCs. We demonstrate that these corpus-based measures correlate well with human judgments of the relevant property. We also use the acceptability measure to estimate the degree to which a semantic class of nouns can productively form LVCs with a given verb. The linguistically-motivated measures outperform a standard measure for capturing the strength of collocation of these multiword expressions.