Lexical Development Research Articles

Contributions of episodic memory to novel word learning

Abstract Multiple theories predict that word learning is intimately linked to episodic memory, at least in the early phases of learning. However, it is unclear to what degree this link reflects more domain-specific (i.e., those dedicated to language or the lexicon) or more domain-general episodic memory processes that operate outside of language. One way to address this possibility is by using a behavioral individual differences design. This study examined whether behavioral individual differences in episodic memory abilities predicted adult word learning abilities. If behavioral performance in a nonlinguistic episodic memory task is predictive of behavioral performance in word learning, then it is likely that they share a common underlying nonlinguistic, memory-based mechanism. The results revealed that individual differences in episodic memory abilities predicted word learning abilities shortly after learning but not two days later. These behavioral results are consistent with prior neuropsychological observations (e.g., in amnesia: Kensinger, Ullman, & Corkin, 2001) as well as with theories positing a shift in reliance in lexical development from episodic memory to a distributed neocortical memory system after a period of sleep (e.g., Davis & Gaskell, 2009).

Age at Onset of Declarative Gestures and 24-Month Expressive Vocabulary Predict Later Language and Intellectual Abilities in Young Children With Williams Syndrome.

Background: One of the most consistent findings in the early language acquisition literature regarding children in the general population is that the onset of declarative pointing gestures precedes the onset of expressive referential language. Furthermore, frequency of early use of declarative gestures is a stronger predictor of later lexical development than early vocabulary size. These findings suggest that early declarative gestures may play a critical facilitative role in later language development. To evaluate the universality of these findings, we tested children with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder associated with both language and communicative gesture delay.Method: Participants were 47 children with classic-length WS deletions. Age of onset of declarative show and point were determined by parental report on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI): Words and Gestures. Expressive vocabulary size at onset of these gestures, first referential expressive word, 24 months, and 48 months and grammatical complexity at 48 months were determined by parental report on the CDI: Words and Sentences. Receptive and expressive vocabulary and overall intellectual ability at 48 months were measured using standardized assessments.Results: In contrast to previous findings for children in the general population, most children with WS began to produce referential language several months before they produced declarative point. A series of multiple regressions indicated that both age at onset of declarative point and expressive vocabulary size at 24 months made significant independent contributions to individual differences in lexical, grammatical, and overall intellectual ability at 48 months. Similarly to the findings for typically developing children and children with other developmental disabilities, individual differences in the declarative gesture measure accounted for considerably more variance in 48-month lexical ability than early expressive vocabulary size.Discussion: The transition from prelinguistic communication to initial referential language does not depend on the onset of the ability to use declarative point. Nevertheless, the length of time that a child has been producing declarative point was a better predictor than early expressive vocabulary of later lexical abilities. Thus, despite the earlier divergence in their path to language development from the typical one, the path for children with WS re-converges with that for typically developing children and children with other developmental disabilities.

Pitch properties of infant-directed speech specific to word-learning contexts: a cross-linguistic investigation of Mandarin Chinese and Dutch.

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS); (2) whether pitch properties change when mothers address children from 18 to 24 months; and (3) how Mandarin Chinese and Dutch IDS differ in their pitch properties in word-learning contexts. Results show that the mean pitch of Mandarin Chinese IDS was already ADS-like when children were 24 months, but Dutch IDS remained exaggerated in pitch at the same age. Crucially, Mandarin Chinese mothers used a higher pitch and a larger pitch range in IDS when introducing unfamiliar words, while Dutch mothers used a higher pitch specifically for familiar words. These findings contribute to the language-specificity of prosodic input in early lexical development.

Early lexical development of children raised in institutional care in Russia.

Children abandoned to institutions display a host of developmental delays, including those involving general cognition and language. The majority of published studies focus on children over 3years of age; little is known about whether these delays may be detected earlier when children undergo rapid lexical development. To investigate the early language development of children raised in institutional settings in the Russian Federation, we compared a group of children in institutional care (n=36; 8-35months) to their age-matched peers raised in biological families, who have never been institutionalized (n=72) using the Russian version of the CDI. The results suggest that institutionalization is associated with pronounced delays in children's early language development with large and robust effect sizes. Among children with a history of institutionalization, these delays are also associated with difficulties in Daily Living skills, communication, and socialization.

Emotion word comprehension in children aged 4–7 years

Despite its importance for furthering social relationships, the development of the emotional lexicon has seldom been studied. Recent research suggests that during childhood, emotion words are acquired less rapidly than concrete words, but more rapidly than abstract words. The present study directly compared the comprehension of emotion words with the comprehension of concrete and abstract words in children aged 4–7 years. Children were shown 48 sets of four pictures and for each set had to point to the picture corresponding to a word that had just been pronounced. Words referred to concrete (16), abstract (16), or emotional (16) concepts. Results showed that concrete words were better understood than either emotion or abstract words, and emotion words were better understood than abstract ones. This finding emphasises the importance of the emotional lexicon in lexical development, and suggests that emotion word comprehension should be enhanced through regular training. This would increase children’s emotional knowledge, improve their communication skills, and promote their socialisation.

The contribution of L1 and L2 proficiency, background knowledge, and passage sight vocabulary to EFL incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading

This study investigated the contributions of L1 proficiency, L2 proficiency, background knowledge, and passage sight vocabulary to L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading. The relative contributions of these factors were also examined. The participants were 121 Korean middle school students studying English as a foreign language. The independent variables first included completion of the reading section of the National Academic Achievement Test of Korean and English, a background knowledge questionnaire, and a passage sight vocabulary test. The participants read a passage and subsequently took a vocabulary posttest. Multiple regression analysis revealed that L1 proficiency was not a significant predictor of L2 vocabulary acquisition, suggesting that L1-L2 interdependence is somewhat limited insofar as incidental vocabulary acquisition. Also, the results revealed that passage sight vocabulary had the largest significant effect, L2 proficiency had a large significant effect, and background knowledge had a moderate significant effect on L2 lexical development through reading. The implications of the findings in relation to L2 vocabulary instruction were also discussed.

Lexical and gestural development in 5p deletion syndrome—A case report

PurposeIndividuals with 5p deletion syndrome (also known as cri du chat syndrome) have various speech and language problems. The aim of this work was to examine early gestural and lexical development in a boy with this syndrome and to see to what extent his skills in these areas were delayed and/or deviant when compared to typically developing children. MethodThe participant’s parents completed the Norwegian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development inventories (CDI) ten times over a period of five years. His scores were compared to those of typically developing infants aged eight to 20 months. ResultsIt was found that the subject followed a considerably delayed, but not deviant, developmental trajectory in three areas, receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary and communicative gestures, compared to typically developing infants and toddlers. ConclusionThe speech and language problems of individuals with 5p deletion syndrome, which have been documented in the domains of phonetics and phonology and grammar, also extend to gestural and lexical development. The findings of this study will have clinical implications for assessment, in that a broad assessment of gestural and lexical skills should be carried out as early as possible as a basis for interventions to improve communicative skills.

Lexical Development in Bilingual French/ Portuguese Speaking Toddlers

In this study, we explore if French-European Portuguese (EP)-speaking bilingual toddlers produce the same number of words as their monolingual peers, in French, in EP, or in both languages. Furthermore, we explore the link between language dominance and lexicon size. We tested 53 bilingual French-EP children, among which 16 were 16–18 months old, 16 were 24–25 months old and 21 were 30–35 months old. The parents completed the French and the EP Communicative Development Inventory (adaptations of MacArthur–Bates CDI [Fenson et al., 2007]), the PaBiQ (Tuller, 2015) to evaluate language dominance and the ASQ-3 (Squires et al., 2009) to assess their developmental stages. The total vocabulary (both language combined, TV?F+EP), the total vocabulary (TV) in each language (TV?EP and TV?F) and the conceptual vocabulary (CV) were calculated. These vocabulary measures were compared with the monolingual norms in French and EP. The results showed that almost all participants had the same performance in vocabulary acquisition as their monolingual peers in French and EP, measured through the CDI in each language respectively. Their TV?F+EP and CV exceeded the vocabulary of monolinguals and language dominance was correlated with vocabulary size.

Phonological development of Finnish speaking children at 3;6 and associations to previous and simultaneous lexical ability

ABSTRACT Previous studies of Finnish children’s phonological development focus mainly on children under 2;0. Earlier findings have suggested that phonological and lexical development are strongly associated at an early age. However, less is known about the longitudinal association. This study describes the phonological skills of Finnish-speaking children at 3;6 and compares them with early lexicon size at 2;0 and lexical ability at 3;6 (N = 67). The children’s phonological development was measured using The Finnish Phonology Test. Lexical development was evaluated using the Finnish, long-form version of the Communicative Development Inventory at 2;0 and the Boston naming test at 3;6 At 3;6, all children mastered the vowels and diphthongs fully, and most of the children also mastered the consonants, with the exception of the phonemes/d/and/r/. Phonotactic skills had also been acquired well at this group level, although the word-medial and, especially, word-initial consonant clusters were still challenging. The percentage of phonemes correct was 95. Both paradigmatic and phonotactic skills at 3;6 were significantly associated with lexicon size at 2;0. In addition phonotactic skills correlated with naming ability at 3;6. Lexical development at 2;0 explained 21% of the variance in the phonological development at 3;6, whereas, the explaining value of simultaneous lexical skill was limited (9%). Present findings propose that associations between lexical and phonological skills weaken as phonological skills become more honed.

Dual language input and the impact of language separation on early lexical development.

We examined properties of the input and the environment that characterize bilingual exposure in 11-month-old infants with a regular exposure to French and an additional language, and their possible effects on receptive vocabulary size. Using a diary method, we found that a majority of the families roughly followed a one-parent-one-language approach. Yet, the two languages co-occurred to various extents within the same half-hour both within and across speakers. We used exploratory correlation analyses to examine potential effects of the dual input on the size of infants' vocabularies. The results revealed some evidence for an impact of language separation by speakers.

The effects of contexts on the acquisition of oral lexical ability in English as a foreign language

ABSTRACT While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical development in oral production by advanced learners of English experiencing two different contexts of acquisition: formal instruction (FI) at home, followed by a 3-month stay abroad (SA). Speech samples were elicited from a group of 30 Catalan/Spanish undergraduates before and after each learning context by means of an oral interview and were later analyzed in terms of lexical diversity, sophistication, density and accuracy. Additionally, we examined baseline data from 25 native speakers of English, elicited through the same task. Our results reveal that both contexts enhance significant development in lexical accuracy and that SA proves especially beneficial for growth in adverb density, which moves towards target-like norm and adds fluidity to learners’ speech. FI, in contrast, causes a significant impact on lexical sophistication, as learners seem to acquire more specific vocabulary during classroom instruction.

A longitudinal investigation of structural brain changes during second language learning

Few studies have examined the time course of second language (L2) induced neuroplasticity or how individual differences may be associated with brain changes. The current longitudinal structural magnetic resonance imaging study examined changes in cortical thickness (CT) and gray matter volume (GMV) across two semesters of L2 Spanish classroom learning. Learners’ lexical processing was assessed via a language decision task containing English and Spanish words. Our findings indicated that (1) CT increased in the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) after L2 learning, (2) CT in the right MTG increased in individuals who were better able to discriminate between native language and L2 words, and (3) CT in the left ACC was correlated with functional connectivity between the ACC and MTG. These findings indicate that L2 lexical development is associated with functional and structural changes in brain regions important for cognitive control and semantic processing.

Variability and stability in early language acquisition: Comparing monolingual and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition

AbstractMany human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.

Expressive Vocabulary Growth After Pediatric Auditory Brainstem Implantation in Two Cases' Spontaneous Productions: A Comparison With Children With Cochlear Implants and Typical Hearing.

Auditory brainstem implants (ABI) are recently being used to restore hearing of children with a congenital hearing loss, due to for instance the absence of auditory nerves. Thus far, the literature has focused on perceptual outcomes. The present study is among the first ones to investigate the spoken language development after implantation. The lexical development of children with ABI is examined longitudinally in comparison to children with typical hearing and children with cochlear implants. Results show that children with ABI still have smaller spoken vocabularies as compared to (hearing) age-matched children with cochlear implants and children with typical hearing. Implications will be discussed.

Sensitivity to emotion information in children’s lexical processing

We tested predictions of multiple representation accounts of conceptual processing, including the proposal that emotion information may provide a bootstrapping mechanism for vocabulary acquisition. We investigated the influence of word valence on children’s lexical processing, presenting 40 positive words, 40 neutral words, and 40 negative words in an auditory lexical decision task (ALDT), along with 120 nonwords. We tested 99 children across three age groups: 5, 6, or 7 years. There were no significant effects of valence on the ALDT responses of 5-year-old children. The 6-year-old children, however, were faster to respond to negative words than to neutral words and, for more abstract words, faster to respond to positive words than to neutral words. The 7-year-old children were faster for positive words than for neutral words, regardless of concreteness. As such, children showed sensitivity to word valence in lexical processing, at a younger age than had been established in previous research. In addition, children’s language skills were related to their improved processing of more abstract neutral words between 6 and 7 years of age. These results are consistent with multimodal accounts of word meaning and lexical development.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ РЕЧЕВОГО ВЫСКАЗЫВАНИЯ НА ЭТАПЕ ЛЕКСИКО-ГРАММАТИЧЕСКОГО РАЗВЕРТЫВАНИЯ ПРИ ПЕРЕВОДЕ С КИТАЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА НА РУССКИЙ

The article deals with the peculiarities of the lexical development and grammatical structuring of a speech utterance in the process of interpreting a written text from Chinese into Russian by students-orientalists with the use of a psychophysiological method - oculography (the study of oculomotor activity parameters). The analysis of the experimental data has allowed the author to conclude that reading and understanding of a text/sentence in the source (Chinese) language during interpretation are conditioned by the variability of gaze trajectories.

Early lexicon and language skills at 42 months

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have shown that early lexical development is associated with later language development. It is less clear which language domains early receptive/expressive lexicons are associated with. This study analyses these associations. The study also investigates whether children with slow/typical/fast developing early receptive/expressive lexical skills differed in their language skills at three and a half years (42 months) and the predictive value of early receptive/expressive lexical skills for later language skills.The participants of this longitudinal study were 68 healthy, monolingual Finnish-speaking children whose language development was measured using the Finnish, short-form-version of the Communicative Development Inventories at 12, 15, 18 and 24 months. At 42 months, language skills of the participants were assessed using tests measuring lexical, phonological, morphological and general receptive/expressive language skills.Early receptive lexicon was associated with later morphological skills from 15 months and onwards and with other language domains at 24 months. Early expressive lexicon was associated with later morphological skills at 15 months and onwards but with other language domains from 18 months. A trend was found that children with different early lexical growth rates differed in their language skills at 42 months. The best models for predicting later receptive/expressive language skills included variables from both early receptive and expressive lexicons. These models worked well to explain receptive/expressive language skills at 42 months (63/78% of the variance).This study provides novel information on the specific associations between receptive and expressive lexicon growth and later language skills. For clinicians, measuring both receptive and expressive lexicons provides the most representative information on children’s language development.

Modeling early lexico-semantic network development: Perceptual features matter most.

What aspects of word meaning are important in early word learning and lexico-semantic network development? Adult lexico-semantic systems flexibly encode multiple types of semantic features, including functional, perceptual, taxonomic, and encyclopedic. However, various theoretical accounts of lexical development differ on whether and how these semantic properties of word meanings are initially encoded into young children's emerging lexico-semantic networks. Whereas some accounts highlight the importance of early perceptual versus conceptual properties, others posit that thematic or functional aspects of word meaning are primary relative to taxonomic knowledge. We seek to shed light on these debates with 2 modeling studies that explore patterns in early word learning using a large database of early vocabulary in 5,450 children, and a newly developed set of semantic features of early acquired nouns. In Study 1, we ask whether semantic properties of early acquired words relate to order in which these words are typically learned; Study 2 models normative lexico-semantic noun-feature network development compared to random network growth. Both studies provide converging evidence that perceptual properties of word meanings play a key role in early word learning and lexico-semantic network development. The findings lend support to theoretical accounts of language learning that highlight the importance of the child's perceptual experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Latvian CDI: methodology, developmental trends, and cross-linguistic comparison

ABSTRACT In this article, we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) – a parental report tool aimed at mapping the lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: ‘Words and Gestures’ (8–16 months), and CDI II: ‘Words and Sentences’ (17–36 months). This article discusses the Internet-based methodology used for the data collection, reports the main developmental trends of the lexical development of Latvian children, and compares these trends to analogous data from American English, Norwegian, and Russian.

Neurodevelopmental outcome at 2\xa0years of age in preterm infants with late-onset sepsis

Late-onset sepsis is associated with impaired neurodevelopmental outcome in preterm infants. This prospective cohort study aims to establish the effect of sepsis after 72 h of life on cognitive, psychomotor, and language development of preterm infants (below 32 weeks gestational age and/or below 1500 g). At 2 years corrected age, neurodevelopmental outcome was tested using Bayley’s Scales of Infant Development-II, Lexilijst (lexical development questionnaire), and behavior checklists. Of 117 patients included, 85 experienced blood culture–proven infection. Coagulase-negative staphylococci were responsible for 55% of the episodes. No significant differences were found in cognitive, motor, and behavioral scores or lexiquotient comparing patients with versus no proven infection. When comparing three groups (coagulase-negative staphylococci, other, and negative blood culture), a significant difference was found in composite cognitive scores (p = 0.016), in favor of the coagulase-negative staphylococci group versus other causal agent group (p = 0.007). No significant differences were found in other subscales.Conclusion: In this cohort, no differences were found in neurodevelopmental outcome at 2 years corrected age between proven and no proven infection groups; confirmation in larger cohorts with a control group is needed. Patients encountering coagulase-negative staphylococci sepsis showed a significant better cognitive outcome compared to other causal agents.What is Known:• Late-onset sepsis is associated with impaired neurodevelopmental outcome in preterm infants.What is New:• Preterm infants encountering late-onset sepsis by coagulase-negative staphylococci show a better cognitive outcome in comparison to other causal infectious agents in this cohort.• No differences were found in neurodevelopment at 2 years of age in preterm infants with suspected lateonset sepsis, between proven and no proven infection groups. Confirmation is needed in larger cohorts with a substantial control group.