Lexical Acquisition Research Articles

Assessing the Impact of Morphological Knowledge on Lexical Acquisition and Processing

The mastery of morphological structure and vocabulary acquisition are significantly associated. However, the association between the abilities of L2 learners to manipulate morphological elements and develop vocabulary size with native Arabic speakers needs to be assessed. This study assesses the impact of morphological knowledge on lexical acquisition and processing among English-speaking learners of Arabic. The study focused on gender (masculine/feminine) and the complete number system (singular/dual/plural) by native English speakers. The error rates and error patterns were analysed carefully to provide insight into the learner’s interlanguage grammar through the experiment. The experimental study design was used. The study sample included 40 of L2 Arabic speakers from Arabic language courses at major universities in Northern Virginia and Maryland. These were native English speakers with no exposure to Arabic before their enrolment in the university. The sample was divided into three groups (Group I, individual in the second year of Arabic program, Group II, individual in 3rd or 4th year of the program, and Group III control group, five native speakers of Arabic). Different tasks were presented to the groups, where PsychoPy software was used for task presentation. Audacity Version 2.0 was audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded by the experimenter. The production and comprehension test revealed that morphological problems are prevalent at the advanced proficiency level. It showed the role of animacy for the morphological variability and higher agreement accuracy for human targets. It concluded that morphological variability in L2 Arabic remains a persistent problem even at advanced levels of proficiency, extending to comprehension.

Using eye-tracking to examine the role of first and second language glosses

This study employs eye-tracking to investigate how first (L1) and second language (L2) glosses affect lexical uptake and reading behaviors in L2 learners of English. The study also explores the relationship between lexical uptake and reading behaviors as a function of gloss type. To investigate this, 81 Korean university students were asked to read a baseline passage with no gloss or the same passage with glosses in the study’s L1 (Korean) or L2 (English). Their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker as they read, and they were subsequently asked to respond to two vocabulary tests. Analyses of eye-tracking data and vocabulary test scores revealed that the presence or absence of L1 and L2 glosses might produce differences in lexical uptake and dissimilar attentional mechanisms. For instance, the study found that L1 and L2 glosses failed to significantly enhance the acquisition of visual word forms, whereas both types of glosses were significantly effective in consolidating form–meaning associations. Additionally, correlation analyses indicated that the relationship between reading behaviors and lexical acquisition might differ depending on gloss type. Ultimately, our findings provide a more comprehensive picture of L1 and L2 gloss effects, and have significant implications for L2 pedagogy.

Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language.

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants' vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Results reveal that: (1) although verbs predominate in the linguistic input, children's lexicons favor nouns over verbs; (2) children's early noun-advantage decreases, coming into closer alignment with the patterns in the linguistic input at a MLU of 1.5; and (3) this early transition is temporally related to children's increasing productive command over the grammatical categories that characterize the morphology of both nouns and verbs. These findings emphasize the early effects of language-specific properties of the input, broadening the vantage point from which to view the lexical acquisition process.

Improved and scalable online learning of spatial concepts and language models with mapping

We propose a novel online learning algorithm, called SpCoSLAM 2.0, for spatial concepts and lexical acquisition with high accuracy and scalability. Previously, we proposed SpCoSLAM as an online learning algorithm based on unsupervised Bayesian probabilistic model that integrates multimodal place categorization, lexical acquisition, and SLAM. However, our original algorithm had limited estimation accuracy owing to the influence of the early stages of learning, and increased computational complexity with added training data. Therefore, we introduce techniques such as fixed-lag rejuvenation to reduce the calculation time while maintaining an accuracy higher than that of the original algorithm. The results show that, in terms of estimation accuracy, the proposed algorithm exceeds the original algorithm and is comparable to batch learning. In addition, the calculation time of the proposed algorithm does not depend on the amount of training data and becomes constant for each step of the scalable algorithm. Our approach will contribute to the realization of long-term spatial language interactions between humans and robots.

Lexical orthographic knowledge acquisition in adults: The whole-word visual processing impact

IntroductionOne of the most persistent difficulties in French written language acquisition is lexical orthographic memorization. Both theoretical models and behavioral studies have suggested that simultaneous visual processing of all the letters of a word could be important for the acquisition of its orthographic form. Main goalTwo experiments are conducted to test this whole-word visual processing hypothesis. MethodThe paradigm used in both experiments is a self-teaching paradigm in which adult participants had to read orthographically complex bisyllabic pseudowords in isolation. In one reading condition, all the letters of the item are available at once, in the other the first and second syllables are seen successively. After reading, participants had to spell under dictation and to recognize the written items. ResultsGlobally, the results showed that participants better recall the orthographic form of a word after having read it in the whole-word reading condition. The result of the recognition task, in the second experiment, was in line with the result of the spelling under dictation task. ConclusionThese results, although they should be interpreted with caution, are in line with the whole-word visual processing hypothesis. Applied consequences for orthographic learning and teaching, as for remediation of specific orthographic disabilities, are discussed.

EFL Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention : Effects of Different Collaborative Output Tasks on Field Independent/Dependent Learners

A plethora of studies concerning second language acquisition have argued that collaborative output task, as a reading enhancement activity, is facilitative to promoting second language incidental vocabulary acquisition. However, how learner’s cognitive style indexed by field dependent (FD) or field independent (FI) mediates L2 incidental vocabulary learning and retention through collaborative output tasks in Chinese EFL context remains under-explored. Inviting a total of 120 Chinese university students as participants, this study investigated the effects of different collaborative output tasks on FI and FD Learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition. The results showed that 1) collaborative written output task was more contributive to receptive lexical acquisition and retention for FD learners whereas FI learners were less susceptible to output collaborative task type; 2) regardless of learner’s cognitive style, collaborative written output task was superior over the oral output mode in productive lexical gains, but not in retaining lexical learning; 3) FI learners have advantages in L2 vocabulary learning, compared with their FD counterparts.

Experimental Study on A Two-string Lexical Decision Task: Non-words and Words

<p class="0abstract"><strong>Abstract—</strong>This paper introduces the general purposes, hypotheses and designs of the lexical decision task and compares the results of several existing studies. Based on previous studies, three hypotheses are proposed. Then, it illustrates a two-lexical decision task designed and completed by the Research School of Psychology, Australian National University. In comparison with traditional lexical decision task, the two-string lexical decision task further tests participants’ response time to non-words and words. The results of the current two-string lexical decision task experiment verify the validity of previous studies on the one hand, while on the other hand, do not fully support the statement that participants would make faster responses to unrelated words than unrelated non-words. The findings of the current study directly provide cognitive processes for English lexical differentiation and learning, which could give hints to English lexical teaching and acquisition.</p>

Principios didácticos para la enseñanza de vocabulario en español como lengua de aprendizaje del alumnado inmigrante

La comprensión de la naturaleza de la competencia léxica debe servir de guía para enfocar su enseñanza de una manera más sistemática. En este artículo se establecen unos principios didácticos generales a partir de los diversos componentes que la integran, enfocados a una enseñanza más eficaz del léxico del español como segunda lengua del alumnado inmigrante en el contexto escolar, atendiendo a sus necesidades de aprendizaje. El objetivo es reforzar la adquisición del léxico con objetivos, contenidos y estrategias metodológicas claras que incluyan actividades sobre los procesos de comprensión, almacenamiento y recuperación para el uso progresivo del vocabulario académico en español. Para concluir este artículo, se ofrece una secuenciación didáctica de actividades para el desarrollo de la comprensión lectora y la competencia léxica, dirigida a alumnos inmigrantes, a partir de un texto escolar de Primaria.

Delayed development of phonological constancy in toddlers at family risk for dyslexia

Phonological constancy refers to infants’ ability to disregard variations in the phonetic realisation of speech sounds that do not indicate lexical contrast, e.g., when listening to accented speech. In typically-developing infants, this ability develops between 15- and 19-months of age, coinciding with the consolidation of infants’ native phonological competence and vocabulary growth. Here we investigated the developmental time course of phonological constancy in infants at family risk for developmental dyslexia, using a longitudinal design. Developmental dyslexia is a disorder affecting the acquisition of reading and spelling skills, and it also affects early auditory processing, speech perception, and lexical acquisition. Infants at-risk and not at-risk for dyslexia, based on a family history of dyslexia, participated when they were 15-, 19-, and 26-months of age. Phonological constancy was indexed by comparing at-risk and not at-risk infants’ ability to recognise familiar words in two preferential looking tasks: (1) a task using words presented in their native accent, and (2) a task using words presented in a non-native accent. We expected a delay in phonological constancy for the at-risk infants. As predicted, in the non-native accent task, not at-risk infants recognised familiar words by 19 months, but at-risk infants did not. The control infants thus exhibited phonological constancy. By 26 months, at-risk toddlers did show successful word recognition in the native accent task. However, for the non-native accent task at 26 months, neither at-risk nor control infants showed familiar word recognition. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of family risk for dyslexia on toddlers’ consolidation of early phonological and lexical skills.

Terms Denoting Parts of a Tree - A Contrastive Approach

The frequent misuse of specialized terms by forestry students, due to the wrong assumption that they are synonymous, requires an endeavor to detect and correct inaccuracies in monolingual and bilingual lexicography for a more efficient process of learning and/or teaching L2. In this spirit, the aims of this article are to identify the denominations of the parts of a tree in Romanian and English, and to verify their equivalence in both languages. The method used to describe and examine this sector of the lexicon is the semic analysis, commonly applied in lexical field theory. The first section of the article presents a brief theoretical overview of the lexical field theory and the methodological framework. The discussion continues with the semic analysis of a number of lexemes denoting parts of a tree in Romanian, which is based on the lexicographic and terminological definitions, and ends with several observations regarding the distinction between these two types of definitions (section two). Section three is dedicated to the semantic analysis of the English equivalents of the Romanian lexemes, while the last section reveals important concluding remarks related to the similarities and differences between the two language systems. The desired final product of this research resides in its didactic applicability, more specifically in efficient methods of L1 and L2 lexical acquisition.

Minimally-verbal children with autism show deficits in theta and gamma oscillations during processing of semantically-related visual information

To acquire language, children must build phonemic representations of their native language, learn to associate auditory words to visual objects and assemble a lexicon. It is not clear however, whether the limited linguistic ability seen in minimally-verbal (MV) children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) relates to deficits in cortical representation of an object and/or in linking an object to its semantic information. This EEG-based study investigated neural mechanisms underlying visual processing of common objects in MV-ASD and control children. Ten MV-ASD children, 4- to 7- years-old and 15 age/gender-matched controls, were presented with a picture-word matching paradigm. Time-frequency analyses were conducted at the sources generating the event-related responses at both early and late visual processing. Permutation testing identified spectral power and phase coherence clusters that significantly differed between the groups. As compared to controls, MV-ASD children exhibited smaller amplitudes and longer source latencies; decreased gamma and theta power with less theta phase coherence in occipital regions, and reduced frontal gamma power. Our results confirm that visual processing is altered in MV-ASD children and suggest that some of the linguistic differences observed in these children arise from impaired object/label cortical representations and reduced allocation of attention, which would impact lexical acquisition.

Effects of grammatical category and morphology on fast mapping in typically developing and late talking toddlers

The purpose of this study was to examine early fast mapping abilities in late talkers (LT) and typically developing (TD) Spanish-speaking children by considering the effect of different variables on fast mapping (age, vocabulary level, grammatical category and number morphology). Thirty-eight Spanish-speaking children were assessed at three times (21 to 24 months at the beginning of the study). A group of LT was matched in age with a TD control group. They completed a fast mapping task with a disambiguation phase and an extension phase. Results show that vocabulary level and age interact with grammatical category and number morphology. TD children’s performance was significantly higher than LT children’s, but these differences decreased with age. Results suggest that the incorporation of new labels does not work automatically; some children may need repeated exposures to word–referent pairings. Longitudinal results suggest the importance of looking at the dynamics of lexical acquisition in addition to vocabulary size.

Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants

Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody) and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words: Participants (N = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring to either an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.

Lexical knowledge boosts statistically-driven speech segmentation.

The hypothesis that known words can serve as anchors for discovering new words in connected speech has computational and empirical support. However, evidence for how the bootstrapping effect of known words interacts with other mechanisms of lexical acquisition, such as statistical learning, is incomplete. In 3 experiments, we investigated the consequences of introducing a known word in an artificial language with no segmentation cues other than cross-syllable transitional probabilities. We started with an artificial language containing 4 trisyllabic novel words and observed standard above-chance performance in a subsequent recognition memory task. We then replaced 1 of the 4 novel words with a real word (tomorrow) and noted improved segmentation of the other 3 novel words. This improvement was maintained when the real word was a different length to the novel words (philosophy), ruling out an explanation based on metrical expectation. The improvement was also maintained when the word was added to the 4 original novel words rather than replacing 1 of them. Together, these results show that known words in an otherwise meaningless stream serve as anchors for discovering new words. In interpreting the results, we contrast a mechanism where the lexical boost is merely the consequence of attending to the edges of known words, with a mechanism where known words enhance sensitivity to transitional probabilities more generally.

Network Growth Modeling to Capture Individual Lexical Learning

Network models of language provide a systematic way of linking cognitive processes to the structure and connectivity of language. Using network growth models to capture learning, we focus on the study of the emergence of complexity in early language learners. Specifically, we capture the emergent structure of young toddler’s vocabularies through network growth models assuming underlying knowledge representations of semantic and phonological networks. In construction and analyses of these network growth models, we explore whether phonological or semantic relationships between words play a larger role in predicting network growth as these young learners add new words to their lexicon. We also examine how the importance of these semantic and phonological representations changes during the course of development. We propose a novel and significant theoretical framework for network growth models of acquisition and test the ability of these models to predict what words a specific child is likely to learn approximately one month in the future. We find that which acquisition model best fits is influenced by the underlying network representation, the assumed process of growth, and the network centrality measure used to relate the cognitive underpinnings of acquisition to network growth. The joint importance of representation, process, and the contribution of individual words to the predictive accuracy of the network model highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of early acquisition, provides new tools, and suggests experimental hypotheses for studying lexical acquisition.

Lexical acquisition of veterinary lexicon (German-Spanish): a proposal based on corpus for the translation

La profesión veterinaria abarca un elevado número de campos y disciplinas y ámbitos de actuación, entre las que caben señalar la medicina veterinaria, el control de la calidad alimentaria, la salud pública y laboral, la producción animal, el bienestar animal o la industria farmacéutica, entre otros. Ello supone que los textos sobre los que se sustentan estas especialidades contienen una alta densidad léxica, como sucede con otros campos de las Ciencias de la Salud. En este trabajo ofrecemos una propuesta para la adquisición y el aprendizaje del léxico especializado del sector veterinario en el par de lenguas alemán-español.

Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences.

This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to categorize words into lexical categories. The categorization outcome was regressed over three main distributional predictors computed for each word, including frequency, contextual diversity, and average conditional probability given all the co-occurring contexts. Results show that both contextual diversity and frequency have a positive effect while the average conditional probability has a negative effect. This indicates that words are easier to categorize in the face of uncertainty: categorization works best for words which are frequent, diverse, and hard to predict given the co-occurring contexts. This shows how, in order for the learner to see an opportunity to form a category, there needs to be a certain degree of uncertainty in the co-occurrence pattern.

Lexical Acquisition Through Category Matching: 12-Month-Old Infants Associate Words to Visual Categories

Although it is widely recognized that human infants build a sizeable conceptual repertoire before mastering language, it remains a matter of debate whether and to what extent early conceptual and category knowledge contributes to language development. We addressed this question by investigating whether 12-month-olds used preverbal categories to discover the meanings of new words. We showed that one group of infants (n = 18) readily extended novel labels to previously unseen exemplars of preverbal visual categories after only a single labeling episode, but two other groups struggled to do so when taught labels for unfamiliar categories (those who had been previously exposed, n = 18, or not exposed, n = 18, to category tokens). These results suggest that infants expect labels to denote categories of objects and are equipped with learning mechanisms responsible for matching prelinguistic knowledge structures with linguistic inputs. This ability is consistent with the idea that our conceptual machinery provides building blocks for vocabulary and language acquisition.

Stern, gwiazda or star: Screening receptive vocabulary skills across languages in monolingual and bilingual German–Polish or German–Turkish children using a tablet application

There is a need to provide bilingual assessments and reference data to identify those who struggle to acquire their heritage language (L1) or the language spoken in the country of residence (L2). However, bilingual assessments and data are still sparse. Therefore, the aim was to use a tablet application to screen receptive vocabulary in different languages and discuss this data in the context of lexical acquisition theories. Forty-four monolingual German, 15 bilingual German–Polish and 21 German–Turkish-speaking children aged between 3;5 (3 years and 5 months) and 6;1 were assessed. All children completed the German version of the Receptive Vocabulary Screener (RVS), a tablet application testing 20 nouns and 20 verbs, and two standardized vocabulary sub-tests. Additionally, the bilingual children completed the Turkish or Polish version of the RVS. Internal consistency showed that the RVS is a reliable tool for research purposes and validity was confirmed by significant and moderate to strong correlations with the two standardized vocabulary sub-tests. Monolingual children outperformed bilingual children when performance comparisons were solely based on the German items. However, group differences were not significant when total vocabulary was used, i.e. the number of words bilingual children named across both versions. For bilingual children, L1 and L2 scores did not differ, i.e. they showed a similar performance on the L1/L2 subtest. Paternal education, but not maternal education, was significantly correlated to vocabulary scores. Children with more translation equivalents, i.e. words they know in both languages, and with a higher level of language proficiency showed higher scores on the screener. The app provided a valuable opportunity to assess lexical knowledge across different languages. Results indicated that total vocabulary and translation equivalents must be considered to evaluate bilingual children’s lexical knowledge.

The Shape Bias in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Potential Sources of Individual Differences.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate many mechanisms of lexical acquisition that support language in typical development; however, 1 notable exception is the shape bias. The bases of these children's difficulties with the shape bias are not well understood, and the current study explored potential sources of individual differences from the perspectives of both attentional and conceptual accounts of the shape bias. Shape bias performance from the dataset of Potrzeba, Fein, and Naigles (2015) was analyzed, including 33 children with typical development (M = 20 months; SD = 1.6), 15 children with ASD with high verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 4.6), and 14 children with ASD with low verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 6.6). Lexical predictors (shape-side noun percentage from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; Fenson et al., 2007) and social-pragmatic predictors (joint attention duration during play sessions) were considered as predictors of subsequent shape bias performance. For children in the low verbal ASD group, initiation of joint attention (positively) and passive attention (negatively) predicted subsequent shape bias performance, controlling for initial language and developmental level. Proportion of child's known nouns with shape-defined properties correlated negatively with shape bias performance in the high verbal ASD group but did not reach significance in regression models. These findings suggest that no single account sufficiently explains the observed individual differences in shape bias performance in children with ASD. Nonetheless, these findings break new ground in highlighting the role of social communicative interactions as integral to understanding specific language outcomes (i.e., the shape bias) in children with ASD, especially those with low verbal abilities, and point to new hypotheses concerning the linguistic content of these interactions. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7299581.