Meaning Of Novel Words Research Articles

Cognitive Strategies of Second Language Vocabulary Inferencing: An Eye Tracking Study

In contextual vocabulary acquisition, second language learners address both morphological and contextual cues to infer the meanings of novel words. The study investigated cognitive strategies and their eye movement correlates in contextual vocabulary inferencing task. A sample of 30 healthy participants with normal or corrected to normal vision read an Intermediate-level text in English, aiming to define the meaning of 10 low-frequency words embedded in the text. Based on both unstructured and structured post-hoc reports, we attributed the inferencing process either to word-level processing, context-level processing, or discourse-level processing strategy. Eye movements were recorded on the target word and on the target word clause areas of interest. Inferencing success was associated with increased first fixation duration on the target word both for word- and context-level processing strategy, and increased dwell time on the target word clause for context-level processing strategy. Our findings emphasize the role of both morphological and contextual processing in vocabulary inferencing task.

How do Autistic and Neurotypical Children’s Interests Influence their Accuracy During Novel Word Learning?

Word learning depends on attention – children must focus on the right things at the right times. However, autistic children often display restricted interests, limiting their intake of stimuli during word learning. This study investigates how category interests influence word learning in autism and neurotypical development. Autistic and neurotypical children matched on receptive vocabulary used a touch-screen computer to learn novel words associated with animals (high-interest stimuli) and objects (neutral-interest stimuli) via fast mapping. Response accuracy and speed were examined at referent selection, 5-minute retention, and 24-hour retention. Both groups identified meanings of novel words associated with unfamiliar animals and objects via mutual exclusivity with comparable accuracy. After 5 minutes, autistic children retained animal names with greater accuracy than neurotypical children. Autistic children showed a greater increase in their accuracy between 5-minute and 24-hour retention and outperformed neurotypical children across conditions after a night’s sleep. Across groups, 24-hour retention was predicted by number of target word repetitions heard at referent selection, indicating a relationship between fast mapping input and retention. However, autistic children were slower to respond correctly, particularly in the animal condition. For autistic children, superior word learning associated with high-interest stimuli was relatively short-term, as sleep appeared to consolidate their memory representations for neutral-interest stimuli. Although these results demonstrate that fundamental word learning mechanisms are not atypical in autism, slower response times may signal a speed-accuracy trade-off that could have implications for naturalistic language acquisition. Our findings also indicate favourable environmental conditions to scaffold word learning.

Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words

High quality lexical representations develop through repeated exposures to words in different contexts. This preregistered experiment investigated how diversity of narrative context affects the earliest stages of word learning via reading. Adults (N = 100) learned invented meanings for eight pseudowords, which each occurred in five written paragraphs either within a single coherent narrative context or five different narrative contexts. The words’ semantic features were controlled across conditions to avoid influences from polysemy (lexical ambiguity). Posttests included graded measures of word-form recall (spelling accuracy) and recognition (multiple choice), and word-meaning recall (number of semantic features). Diversity of narrative context did not affect word-form learning, but more semantic features were correctly recalled for words trained in a single context. These findings indicate that learning the meanings of novel words is initially boosted by anchoring them to a single coherent narrative discourse.

To sleep or not to sleep? No effect of sleep on contextual word learning in younger adults.

This study investigated the effect of sleep on novel word learning through reading context. Seventy-four healthy young adults attended two testing sessions, with either overnight sleep (sleep group) or daytime wakefulness (wake group) occurring between the sessions. At the initial learning session, participants identified the hidden meanings of novel words embedded within sentence contexts and were subsequently tested on their recognition of the novel word meanings. A recognition test was also conducted at the delayed session. The analyses revealed comparable recognition of novel word meanings for the sleep and wake group at both the initial and the delayed session, indicating that there was no benefit of sleep compared with wakefulness for novel word learning through context. Overall, this study highlights the critical influence of encoding method on sleep-dependent learning, where not all forms of word learning appear to benefit from sleep for consolidation.

Analogical inference from distributional structure: What recurrent neural networks can tell us about word learning

One proposal that can explain the remarkable pace of word learning in young children is that they leverage the language-internal distributional similarity of familiar and novel words to make analogical inferences about possible meanings of novel words (Lany and Gómez, 2008; Lany and Saffran, 2011; Savic et al., 2022b; Unger and Fisher, 2021; Wojcik and Saffran, 2015). However, a cognitively and developmentally plausible computational account of how language-internal lexical representations are acquired to enable this kind of analogical inference has not been previously investigated. In this work, we tested the feasibility of using the SRN (Elman, 1990) as the supplier of language-internal representations for use in analogical inference. While the SRN is in many ways well suited to this task, we discuss several theoretical challenges that might limit its success. In a series of simulations with controlled artificial languages and the CHILDES corpus, we show that Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are prone to acquiring ‘entangled’ lexical semantic representations, where some features of a word are partially encoded in the representations of other frequently co-occurring words. However, we also show that this problem is mitigated when RNNs are first trained on language input to young children, due to the fact that its distributional structure more reliably predicts semantic category membership of individual words. Overall, our work sheds light on the conditions under which RNNs organize their learned knowledge so that word-level information can be more easily extracted and used in downstream processes, such as word learning.

The influence of conceptual concreteness on the reading acquisition and integration of novel words into semantic memory via thematic relations.

Plenty of studies have been conducted to reveal neurocognitive underpinnings of conceptual representation. Compared with that of concrete concepts, the neurocognitive correlates of abstract concepts remain elusive. The current study aimed to investigate the influence of conceptual concreteness on the reading acquisition and integration of novel words into semantic memory. We constructed two-sentence contexts in which two-character pseudowords were embedded as novel words. Participants read the contexts to infer the meaning of novel words which were either concrete or abstract, and then performed a lexical decision task and a cued-recall memory task. In lexical decision task, primed by the learned novel words, their corresponding concepts, thematically related or unrelated words as well as unlearned pseudowords were judged whether they were words or not. In memory task, participants were presented with the novel words and asked to write down their meaning. The contextual reading and memory test can demonstrate the modulation of conceptual concreteness on novel word learning and the lexical decision task can reveal whether concrete and abstract novel words are integrated into semantic memory similarly or not. During contextual reading, abstract novel words presented for the first time elicited a larger N400 than concrete ones. In memory task, the meaning of concrete novel words was recollected better than abstract novel words. These results indicate that abstract novel words are more difficult to acquire during contextual reading, and to retain afterwards. For lexical decision task behavioral and ERPs were graded, with the longest reaction time, the lowest accuracy and the largest N400s for the unrelated words, then the thematically related words and finally the corresponding concepts of the novel words, regardless of conceptual concreteness. The results suggest that both concrete and abstract novel words can be integrated into semantic memory via thematic relations. These findings are discussed in terms of differential representational framework which posits that concrete words connect with each other via semantic similarities, and abstract ones via thematic relations.

Neural dynamics underlying the processing of implicit form-meaning connections: The dissociative roles of theta and alpha oscillations

Implicit learning plays an important role in the language acquisition. In addition to helping people acquire the form-level rules (e.g., the word order regularities), implicit learning can also facilitate the acquisition of word meanings (i.e., the establishment of connections between the word form and its meanings). Although some behavioral studies have explored the processing of implicit form-meaning connections, the neural dynamics underlying this processing remains unclear. Through examining whether participants could implicitly acquire the literal and metaphorical meanings of novel words, and applying the time-frequency analysis on the electroencephalogram (EEG) data collected in the testing phase, the neural oscillations corresponding to the processing of implicit form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections were explored. The results showed that participants in the experimental group could implicitly acquire the form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections after training, while participants in the control group who were not trained did not have access to such form-meaning connections. Meanwhile, during the processing of form-literal meaning connections, the greater suppression of alpha oscillations was induced by the testing items that follow the same rules as the training items (i.e., the regular testing items) in the experimental group, whereas the stronger enhancement of theta oscillations was elicited by the regular testing items in the experimental group during the processing of form-metaphorical meaning connections. Our study provides insights for understanding the processing of implicit form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections and the neural dynamics underlying the processing.

Developmental differences in EEG oscillations supporting the identification of novel word meaning from context

Implicit learning about new words by picking up on associative information in the contexts they appear in is an important aspect of vocabulary growth. The current study investigated the neural correlates that underlie how school-aged children and adolescents identify the meaning of novel words embedded within sentence contexts. Importantly, we examine how differences in the brain response to novel words and their context differ as a function of 1) explicit learning success, i.e., whether novel word meanings can be correctly estimated in isolation after a learning opportunity, and 2) individual differences in offline language aptitude as well as age across our cohort (N = 82; 8–16 years). Using a regression-based analysis, we identified the unique influence of these individuals difference metrics by using both measures within the same series of models. The most notable finding from our analysis was a frequency-specific dissociation between the way age and language abilities held relationships with task-relevant oscillatory activity during the novel word meaning task: language abilities associated with task-relevant changes in beta band activity during sentence processing, while age associated with task-relevant changes in theta band activity during pseudoword processing. These effects reflect the how the neural correlates of mapping semantic meaning from sentence contexts—an important skill for word learning—is uniquely influenced by the maturity of language abilities as well as age

English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings

ABSTRACT We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”) sentences. When then asked to “Find blicking!” while viewing two-participant versus one-participant actions, children who heard negative-transitive sentences looked longer at the two-participant event than children who heard negative-intransitives. Thus, the mere presence of negation does not disrupt sentence processing and word learning in young children. Experiment 2 tested whether 2-to-4-year-olds (n = 20) use the semantics of negation to restrict the meaning of novel nouns when categorizing objects varying along a perceptual continuum (from 10 to 90% exemplars). Children initially heard “These are blickets” paired with certain exemplars (e.g., yellowish creatures, exemplars 10 and 30%). They then saw additional exemplars (e.g., pinkish creatures, 70 and 90%) while hearing either “These are not blickets” (negative condition) or “These are also blickets” (affirmative condition). At test, when seeing two novel exemplars from the continuum (e.g., creatures 20 and 80%) and asked to find “a blicket,” children in the negative condition selected the exemplar from the bottom of the continuum (i.e., the 20%) more often than children in the affirmative condition. Thus, English-learning children as young as 22-months of age correctly parse negative sentences and 2-to-4-year-olds can use negation to understand the boundaries of a word’s meaning.

The electrophysiological correlates of word pre-activation during associative word learning

Human beings continuously make use of learned associations to generate predictions about future occurrences in the environment. Such memory-related predictive processes provide a scaffold for learning in that mental representations of foreseeable events can be adjusted or strengthened based on a specific outcome. Learning the meaning of novel words through picture-word associations constitutes a prime example of associative learning because pictures preceding words can trigger word prediction through the pre-activation of the related mnemonic representations. In the present electroencephalography (EEG) study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare neural indices of word pre-activation between a word learning condition with maximal prediction likelihood and a non-learning control condition with low prediction. Results revealed that prediction-related N400 amplitudes in response to pictures decreased over time at central electrodes as a function of word learning, whereas late positive component (LPC) amplitudes increased. Notably, N400 but not LPC changes were also predictive of word learning performance, suggesting that the N400 component constitutes a sensitive marker of word pre-activation during associative word learning.

Age-related differences in expectation-based novel word learning.

Adult language users can infer the meaning of a previously unfamiliar word from a single exposure to this word in a semantically and thematically constrained context, henceforth, predictive context (Borovsky et al., 2010 Cognition, 116(2), 289-296; Borovsky et al., 2012 Language Learning and Development, 8(3), 278-302). Children use predictive contexts to anticipate upcoming stimuli (Borovsky et al., 2012 Language Learning and Development, 8(3), 278-302; Mani & Huettig,2012 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(4), 843-847), but the extent to which they rely on prediction to learn novel word forms is unclear (Gambi et al., 2021 Cognition, 211, 104650). Here, we examine children's one-shot learning from predictive contexts using a modified version of the one-shot learning ERP paradigm for children aged 7-13years. In a first learning phase, we presented audio recordings of expected words and unexpected novel pseudowords in strongly and weakly constraining sentence contexts. In the following priming phase, the same recorded words and pseudowords were used as primes to identical/synonymous, related, and unrelated target words. We measured N400 modulations to the word and pseudoword continuations in the learning phase and to the identical/synonymous, related, or unrelated target words in the priming phase. When initially presented in strongly constraining sentences, novel pseudowords primed synonymous targets equally well as word primes of the same intended meaning. This pattern was particularly pronounced in older children. Our findings suggest that, around early adolescence, children can use single exposures to constraining contexts to infer the meaning of novel words and to integrate these novel words in their lexicons.

Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal.

During sentence comprehension, young children anticipate syntactic structures using early-arriving words and have difficulties revising incorrect predictions using late-arriving words. However, nearly all work to date has focused on syntactic parsing in idealized speech environments, and little is known about how children's strategies for predicting and revising meanings are affected by signal degradation. This study compares comprehension of active and passive sentences in natural and vocoded speech. In a word-interpretation task, 5-year-olds inferred the meanings of novel words in sentences that (1) encouraged agent-first predictions (e.g., The blicket is eating the seal implies The blicket is the agent), (2) required revising predictions (e.g., The blicket is eaten by the seal implies The blicket is the theme), or (3) weakened predictions by placing familiar nouns in sentence-initial position (e.g., The seal is eating/eaten by the blicket). When novel words promoted agent-first predictions, children misinterpreted passives as actives, and errors increased with vocoded compared to natural speech. However, when familiar words were sentence-initial that weakened agent-first predictions, children accurately interpreted passives, with no signal-degradation effects. This demonstrates that signal quality interacts with interpretive processes during sentence comprehension, and the impacts of speech degradation are greatest when late-arriving information conflicts with predictions.

New neighbours make bad fences: Form-based semantic shifts in word learning

The meanings of words sometimes shift towards those of similar-sounding words. For example, expunge is etymologically related to puncture but now connotes "wiping away," and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this shift "is probably influenced by phonetic association with sponge." However, evidence for such form-based semantic shifts is anecdotal. We therefore conducted two experiments where participants learned novel words in sentence contexts (e.g., The boss embraiched the team's proposal, so they had to start over) and applied the inferred meanings to ambiguous sentences by providing ratings on a 7-point scale (e.g., Carol embraiched Gerald. How pleased was Gerald?). The inferred meanings of novel words that are spelt like existing words (e.g., embraich, like embrace) shifted towards the meanings of those existing words, relative to control novel words learned in identical contexts (e.g., fline; participants rated Gerald as more pleased to be embraiched than to be flined). These experiments provide the first evidence that newly learned words can indeed undergo form-based semantic shifts. We propose that shifts like these occur during word learning, when words activate rather than inhibit similar-sounding words, and we discuss why they seem to be more common in low-frequency words.

Looking for Wugs in all the Right Places: Children's Use of Prepositions in Word Learning.

To help infer the meanings of novel words, children frequently capitalize on their current linguistic knowledge to constrain the hypothesis space. Children's syntactic knowledge of function words has been shown to be especially useful in helping to infer the meanings of novel words, with most previous research focusing on how children use preceding determiners and pronouns/auxiliary to infer whether a novel word refers to an entity or an action, respectively. In the current visual world experiment, we examined whether 28- to 32-month-olds could exploit their lexical semantic knowledge of an additional class of function words-prepositions-to learn novel nouns. During the experiment, children were tested on their ability to use the prepositions in, on, under, and next to to identify novel creatures displayed on a screen (e.g., The wug is on the table), as well as their ability to later identify the creature without accompanying prepositions (e.g., Look at the wug). Children overall demonstrated understanding of all the prepositions but next to and were able to use their knowledge of prepositions to learn the associations between novel words and their intended referents, as shown by greater-than chance looks to the target referent when no prepositional phrase was provided.

Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning

AbstractA previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2‐ to 4‐year‐old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a noun or a verb. We assigned the children to a noun condition or a verb condition. Before the test, those in the noun condition were exposed to sentences where la petite predicted nouns, and those in the verb condition to sentences where la petite predicted verbs. At testing, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds, but not 2‐year‐olds, from the verb condition looked at the verb interpretation longer than did the children in the noun condition. This suggests a progression in children's ability to rely on input to adapt their predictions in language comprehension.

Grid-like and distance codes for representing word meaning in the human brain

Relational information about items in memory is thought to be represented in our brain thanks to an internal comprehensive model, also referred to as a “cognitive map”. In the human neuroimaging literature, two signatures of bi-dimensional cognitive maps have been reported: the grid-like code and the distance-dependent code. While these kinds of representation were previously observed during spatial navigation and, more recently, during processing of perceptual stimuli, it is still an open question whether they also underlie the representation of the most basic items of language: words. Here we taught human participants the meaning of novel words as arbitrary labels for a set of audiovisual objects varying orthogonally in size and sound. The novel words were therefore conceivable as points in a navigable 2D map of meaning. While subjects performed a word comparison task, we recorded their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By applying a combination of representational similarity and fMRI-adaptation analyses, we found evidence of (i) a grid-like code, in the right postero-medial entorhinal cortex, representing the relative angular positions of words in the word space, and (ii) a distance-dependent code, in medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal, and mid-cingulate cortices, representing the Euclidean distance between words. Additionally, we found evidence that the brain also separately represents the single dimensions of word meaning: their implied size, encoded in visual areas, and their implied sound, in Heschl's gyrus/Insula. These results support the idea that the meaning of words, when they are organized along two dimensions, is represented in the human brain across multiple maps of different dimensionality. Significant statementHow do we represent the meaning of words and perform comparative judgements on them in our brain? According to influential theories, concepts are conceivable as points of an internal map (where distance represents similarity) that, as the physical space, can be mentally navigated. Here we use fMRI to show that when humans compare newly learnt words, they recruit a grid-like and a distance code, the same types of neural codes that, in mammals, represent relations between locations in the environment and support physical navigation between them.

How do children learn novel emotion words? A study of emotion concept acquisition in preschoolers.

Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one's emotions. Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the meaning of that word, in conjunction with situational cues from the environment. No research has examined how children integrate these cues to learn the meaning of emotion adjectives (e.g., "happy," "sad," "mad"). We conducted 2 studies examining the role of sentence frame and situational context in children's (ages 3-5) understanding of the meanings of novel words denoting emotions. In Study 1 (N = 135) children viewed a conversation wherein a novel "alien" word was presented in 1 of 3 sentence frames that varied in how likely the word was to denote an emotion (i.e., is daxy, feels daxy, or feels daxy about). Children selected the image that represented the meaning of the word in a picture-pointing task. Images depicted aliens experiencing an emotion, a physical state, or performing an action. In Study 2 (N = 113) situational context was added via cartoons depicting an emotional scenario. Findings suggest that children are more likely to associate emotion images with a novel word with increasing age, more informative sentence frames, and when the situational context implies that an emotion is present. This provides important insight on how educational and clinical settings can use language and situational context to aide in emotion understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilingual novel word learning in sentence contexts: Effects of semantic and language variation

Abstract Research on word learning demonstrates that meanings of novel words are better recalled when those words are encountered in a variety of semantic contexts than when encountered in the same repeated context. The present study examines how semantic and non-semantic contextual variations in word learning encounters impact learning the meanings of novel words. Across two experiments, highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals studied rare words in repeated or varied semantic contexts, presented in only one language or in both languages. Participants recalled more word meanings when semantic context was varied rather than repeated at study, and this effect did not differ for the more and less proficient languages. However, varying the language context provided no benefit relative to studying words in only one language. Performance patterns were consistent for visual and auditory study modalities, and in both recall and recognition tasks, performance was less accurate overall in the less proficient language than in the more proficient language. These findings replicate the advantage of semantic variation observed in monolingual studies and is the first to directly compare learning from varied and repeated semantic contexts for more and less proficient languages in bilinguals.

Comparing cross-situational word learning, retention, and generalisation in children with autism and typical development

Word learning is complicated by referential ambiguity – there are often multiple potential targets for a newly-heard word. While typically developing (TD) children can accurately infer word meanings from cross-situational statistics, specific difficulties tracking word-object co-occurrences may contribute to language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we investigate cross-situational word learning as an integrated system including mapping, retention, and generalisation in both typical development and autism. In Study 1, children with ASD were as accurate at disambiguating the meanings of novel words from statistical correspondences as TD controls matched on receptive vocabulary. In Study 2, both populations spontaneously utilised social and non-social attentional cues to facilitate and accelerate their mapping of word-referent relationships. Across Studies 1 and 2, both groups retrieved and generalised word-referent representations with impressive and comparable accuracy. Although children with ASD performed very similarly to TD children on measures of learning accuracy, they were significantly slower to identify correct referents under both cued and non-cued learning conditions. These findings indicate that mechanisms supporting cross-situational word learning, and the relationships between them, are not qualitatively atypical in language-delayed children with ASD. However, the increased time required to generate correct responses suggests that these mechanisms may be less efficient, potentially impacting learning in natural environments where visual and auditory stimuli are presented rapidly. Our data support claims that word learning in the longer term is driven by the gradual accumulation of word-object associations over multiple learning instances and could potentially inform the development of interventions designed to scaffold word learning.

Semantic compensation and novel word learning in university students with dyslexia

The aim of this experiment was to use behavioral and electrophysiological methods to compare university students with dyslexia and matched skilled readers in a novel word learning experiment that included phonological categorization tasks, a word learning phase and a test phase with matching and semantic tasks. Specifically, we aimed at disentangling two hypotheses. If phonological processing drives novel word learning and if phonological processing is impaired in students with dyslexia, they should perform lower than skilled readers not only in the phonological categorization tasks but also in the matching and semantic tasks. By contrast, if students with dyslexia use semantic knowledge to compensate for their phonological deficits, should be able to reach the same level of performance and show similar enhancements of the N200 and N400 components than skilled readers in the matching and semantic tasks. Results at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels showed that the phonological deficits evidenced in the phonological tasks did not impede students with dyslexia to learn the meaning of novel words, possibly because they mobilized more frontal resources than skilled readers. These results are discussed within a general framework of semantic compensation in adults with dyslexia.