Word learning in the lab is hard! Data from 14-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants

Infants can learn words in their daily interactions early in life, and many studies have demonstrated that they can also learn words from brief in-lab exposures. While most studies have included monolingual infants, less is known about bilingual infants’ word learning and the role that language familiarity plays in this ability. In this study we examined word learning in a large sample (up to N = 155) of bilingual and monolingual 14-month-olds using a preferential looking paradigm. To support word learning, novel words were presented within sentence frames in one language (single-language condition) or two languages (dual-language condition). We predicted that infants would exhibit greater word–object learning when they were more familiar with the language of the sentence frame. Using both traditional (t-tests) and updated (linear mixed-effects models) analyses, we found no evidence for successful word learning, nor an effect of familiarity. Our results suggest that word learning in experimental settings can be challenging for 14-month-olds, even when sentence frames are provided. We discuss these results in relation to prior work and suggest how open science practices can contribute to more reliable findings about early word learning.

“Where Are The . . .Fixations?”: Grammatical Number Cues Guide Anticipatory Fixations To Upcoming Referents And Reduce Lexical Competition

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological information with the target (e.g., Barr, 2008a). The current study used the visual world paradigm (see Magnuson, 2019) to assess whether and how listeners use contextual cues about grammatical number during sentence processing by presenting target words in carrier phrases that were grammatically unconstraining (“Click on the …”) or grammatically constraining (“Where is/are the …”). Prior to the onset of the target word, listeners were already more likely to fixate on plural objects in the “Where are the…” context than the “Where is the…” context, indicating that they used the construction of the verb to anticipate the referent. Further, participants showed less interference from cohort competitors when the sentence frame made them contextually inappropriate, but still fixated on those words more than on phonologically unrelated distractor words. These results suggest that listeners rapidly and flexibly make use of contextual cues about grammatical number while maintaining sensitivity to the bottom-up input.

Conversation in Aphasia Across Communication Partners: Exploring Stability of Microlinguistic Measures and Communicative Success

PurposeThe aim of this study was to determine if people with aphasia demonstrate differences in microlinguistic skills and communicative success in unstructured, nontherapeutic conversations with a home communication partner (Home-P) as compared to a speech-language pathologist communication partner (SLP-P).MethodEight persons with aphasia participated in 2 unstructured, nontherapeutic 15-minute conversations, 1 each with an unfamiliar SLP-P and a Home-P. Utterance-level analysis evaluated communicative success. Two narrow measures of lexical relevance and sentence frame were used to evaluate independent clauses. Two broad lexical and morphosyntactic measures were used to evaluate elliptical and dependent clauses and to evaluate independent clauses for errors beyond lexical relevance and sentence frame (such as phonological and morphosyntactic errors). Utterances were further evaluated for presence of behaviors indicating lexical retrieval difficulty (pauses, repetitions, and false starts) and for referential cohesion.ResultsNo statistical differences occurred for communicative success or for any of the microlinguistic measures between the SLP-P and Home-P conversation conditions. Four measures (2 of lexical retrieval and 1 each of communicative success and grammaticality) showed high correlations across the 2 conversation samples. Individuals showed variation of no more than 10 percentage points between the 2 conversation conditions for 46 of 56 data points. Variation greater than 10 percentage points tended to occur for the measure of referential cohesion and primarily for 1 participant.ConclusionsPreliminary findings suggest that these microlinguistic measures and communicative success have potential for reliable comparison across Home-P and SLP-P conversations, with the possible exception of referential cohesion. However, further research is needed with a larger, more diverse sample. These findings suggest future assessment and treatment implications for clinical and research needs.Supplemental Materialhttps://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7616312

Assessing Plural Morphology in Children Acquiring /S/-Leniting Dialects of Spanish

Purpose To examine the production of plural morphology in children acquiring a dialect of Spanish with syllable-final /s/ lenition with the goal of comparing how plural marker omissions in the speech of these children compare with plural marker omissions in children with language impairment acquiring other varieties of Spanish. Method Three production tasks were administered to children. A repetition task was used to examine children's production of the plural marker in plural noun phrases, and 2 Berko-style tasks evaluated children's production of the plural marker in bare nouns. Behavior on these tasks was compared with plural marker comprehension for each individual child. Results There was a correlation between children's comprehension of the plural marker and their production of the plural marker on plural noun phrases in the repetition task but not between comprehension and production of the plural marker on bare nouns in the Berko-style tasks. Conclusions Assessments of plural morphology as a clinical marker of language impairment in Spanish-speaking children may be problematic, especially in children acquiring dialects of Spanish with /s/ lenition, such as those originating in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Central America. Instead, for children acquiring /s/-leniting dialects of Spanish, assessments of the plural marker in noun phrases produced within a sentence frame may be a better indicator of acquisition than traditional Berko-style tasks that elicit bare nouns.

Register-Specific Morphophonological Constructions in Japanese

<p>This paper argues that the idea of Construction Morpho(phono)logy (henceforth CM) in the sense of Booij (2010) works well in the analysis of many register-specific expressions in Japanese. Japanese is often (unofficially) said to be morpho-syntactically “less constructional” than languages like English. This kind of remark seems to stem in part from the apparent rarity of constructional template-based innovation like the one cited in (1a), in which the otherwise intransitive verb <em>sneeze</em> occurs in a transitive sentence frame with the help of the well-known “caused-motion construction” given in (1b). What seems to be its Japanese equivalent is clearly ungrammatical, as shown in (1c).</p><p style="text-align-left;padding-left: 15px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">1a. Fred sneezed the napkin off the table. (Goldberg 1995:156)<br />1b. The caused-motion construction in English (Goldberg 1995:152)</p><p style="ext-align-left;padding-left: 30px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">syntax: [SUBJ [V OBJ OBL]]<br /> semantics: ‘X CAUSE Y to MOVE z’</p><p style="text-align-left;padding-left: 15px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">1c. *Hureddo-ga teeburu-kara napukin-o kusyami-si-ta.</p><p style="ext-align-left;padding-left: 30px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">F-NOM table-from napkin-ACC sneeze-do-PST<br /> ‘Fred sneezed the napkin off the table.’</p><p>In this study, however, it will be shown that the language has a rich constructional architecture at least at the word level.</p>

Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children

ABSTRACTThe present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each event was paired with a novel word embedded in a single intransitive verb sentence frame. The results indicated that only 40% of the children were able to map a novel verb onto the action when the mapping task was complex. However, by simplifying the mapping task, 88% of the children succeeded in verb–action mapping. There were no differences in perceptual salience between the agent and action switches in the task. These results provide strong evidence that Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 are able to use an intransitive verb sentence frame to guide early verb learning unless the mapping task consumes too much of their cognitive resources.