Hanako Yoshida

Linguistic Cues Enhance the Learning of Perceptual Cues

When language is correlated with regularities in the world, does it enhance the learning of these regularities? This question lies at the core of both notions of linguistic bootstrapping in children and the Whorfian hypothesis. Support for an affirmative answer is provided in an artificial-noun-learning task in which 2-year-old children were taught to distinguish categories of solid and nonsolid things with and without supporting correlated linguistic cues.

Shifting ontological boundaries: how Japanese- and English- speaking children generalize names for animals and artifacts

Past research shows that young language learners know something about the different category organizations of animals, objects and substances. The three experiments reported here compare Japanese-speaking and English-speaking children’s novel name generalizations for two kinds of objects: clear instances of artifacts and objects with ambiguous features suggestive of animates. This comparison was motivated by the very different nature of individuation in the two languages and by the boundary shift hypothesis that proposes that entities that straddle the individuation boundary of a language are assimilated toward the individuated side. The results of the three experiments support the hypothesis. An explanation in terms of mutually reinforcing correlations among language, perceptual properties and category structure is proposed. Our perceptions and our interactions with objects tell us that there are different kinds of things in the world. There are animate things that react and intentionally move; there are discrete things with stable forms that we move; and there are substances, masses with less regular and more variable forms. This partition of things into animals, objects and substances is sometimes considered an ontological partition, in two senses: in the Aristotelian sense that these are three different kinds of existence and in the psychological sense that these are distinct psychological kinds that provide a foundation for human category learning. In this paper, we propose that the language one learns influences ‐ perturbs slightly but measurably ‐ the boundaries between the psychological categories of animal, object and substance. We present evidence for this idea in three studies of how young children learning Japanese and young children learning English generalize names for things with ambiguous perceptual properties. We concentrate on ambiguous forms not because there are many such entities in the world, but because children’s conceptualizations of ambiguous forms provide insight into their expectations about categories and the mechanisms that create these expectations. Similarly, we study children acquiring two different languages, not solely because of an interest in cross-cultural effects, but primarily as a window onto the mechanisms of development. The larger idea behind this work is that ontological kinds may be the product of statistical regularities among perceptual properties and among these properties and language. We specifically consider this idea in the General discussion. Two issues that have generated much interest and evidence in the literature motivate the experimental hypotheses: (1) the different ways various languages mark individuals and (2) children’s expectations about lexical categories.

Knowledge as Process: Contextually-Cued Attention and Early Word Learning

Learning depends on attention. The processes that cue attention in the moment dynamically integrate learned regularities and immediate contextual cues. This paper reviews the extensive literature on cued attention and attentional learning in the adult literature and proposes that these fundamental processes are likely significant mechanisms of change in cognitive development. The value of this idea is illustrated using phenomena in children novel word learning.

Inhibition and adjective learning in bilingual and monolingual children

The ability to control attention – by inhibiting pre-potent, yet no longer relevant information – is an essential skill in all of human learning, and increasing evidence suggests that this ability is enhanced in language learning environments in which the learner is managing and using more than one language. One question waiting to be addressed is whether such efficient attentional control plays a role in word learning. That is, children who must manage two languages also must manage to learn two languages and the advantages of more efficient attentional control may benefit aspects of language learning within each language. This study compared bilingual and monolingual children’s performances in an artificial word-learning task and in a non-linguistic task that measures attention control. Three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with similar vocabulary development participated in these tasks. The results replicate earlier work showing advanced attentional control among bilingual children and suggest that this better attentional control may also benefit better performance in novel adjective learning. The findings provide the first direct evidence of a relation between performances in an artificial word-learning task and in an attentional control task. We discuss this finding with respect to the general relevance of attentional control for lexical learning in all children and with respect to current views of bilingual children’s word learning.

Known and novel noun extensions: Attention at two levels of abstraction

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that names direct attention at two levels of abstraction: Known names direct attention to the properties most relevant to the specific category; novel names direct attention to the shape, the property most generally relevant across known object names. English-speaking and Japanese-speaking 3-year-olds were shown a novel object that was named with (a) known nouns referring to things similar in shape or similar in material and color, and (b) novel nouns. Given known nouns, children attended to shape when the name referred to a category organized by shape, but they did not when the name referred to a category organized by other properties. Children generalized novel names by shape. The results are discussed within the debate between shape-based and taxonomic categories.

Early noun lexicons in English and Japanese.

Previous research suggests that children learning a variety of languages acquire similar early noun vocabularies and do so by similar and universal processes. We report here results from two studies that show differences in the early noun learning of English- and Japanese-speaking children. Experiment 1 examined the relative numbers of animal names and object names in vocabularies of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children. English-speaking childrens vocabularies were heavily lopsided with many more object than animal names whereas Japanese-speaking childrens vocabularies were more evenly balanced. Experiment 2 used a novel noun extension task to examine what young children know about the different organizations of animal and artifact categories. The results suggest that early learners of English but not Japanese over-generalize what they know about object categories to animal categories. The role of culture, input and linguistic structure in early noun acquisitions is discussed.

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Sound-Symbolism in Children’s Verb Learning

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extended work suggests that such early sensitivity is not limited to children whose language supports such word classes. The present study further considers the use of sound-symbolic words in verb-learning context by conducting systematic cross-linguistic comparisons on early exposure to and effect of sound symbolism in verb mapping. Experiment 1 is an observational study of how English- and Japanese-speaking parents talk about verbs. More conventionalized symbolic words were found in Japanese-speaking parental input, and more idiosyncratic use of sound symbolism was found in English-speaking parental input. Despite this different exposure of iconic forms to describe actions, the artificial verb-learning task in Experiment 2 revealed that children in both language groups benefit from sound–meaning correspondences for their verb learning. These results together confirm more extensive use of conventionalized sound symbolism among Japanese speakers and also support a cross-linguistic consistency of the effect, which has been documented in the recent work. The work also points to the potential value of understanding the contexts in which sound–meaning correspondences matter in language learning.

Contributions of Head-Mounted Cameras to Studying the Visual Environments of Infants and Young Children

Head-mounted video cameras (with and without an eye camera to track gaze direction) are being increasingly used to study infants’ and young childrens visual environments and provide new and often unexpected insights about the visual world from a childs point of view. The challenge in using head cameras is principally conceptual and concerns the match between what these cameras measure and the research question. Head cameras record the scene in front of faces and thus answer questions about those head-centered scenes. In this “Tools of the Trade” article, we consider the unique contributions provided by head-centered video, the limitations and open questions that remain for head-camera methods, and the practical issues of placing head cameras on infants and analyzing the generated video.

Correlation, concepts and cross‐linguistic differences

As the commentaries make clear, our results bear on one of the most fundamental issues in cognitive development: the degree to which thought is determined by language. The language effect reported in the target article is small but informative: language is one force creating ontological distinctions. In this reply, we concentrate on three issues pertinent to the commentators’ reactions to the target article. These are: (1) the nature of correlational learning, (2) what concepts are (or could be) and finally (3) the nature of cross-linguistic differences.

Cognitive and behavioral rating measures of executive function as predictors of academic outcomes in children

ABSTRACT Interrelations of two measurement methods (cognitive versus behavioral ratings) for executive function (EF) were examined and related to reading comprehension and math calculations in fourth and fifth grade students (n = 93) in the context of a diverse urban student population. Relations among measures within four EF processes (working memory, planning, inhibition and shifting) were modest; relations to academics were stronger. EF measures contributed to both academic outcomes even in the context of relevant covariates (age, language and educational program). Working memory was particularly important for reading comprehension across measurement type. Cognitive measures from all EF processes, particularly inhibition and planning, and behavioral ratings of working memory were important for math.