Lulu Song

Why Is Infant Language Learning Facilitated by Parental Responsiveness

Parents’ responsiveness to infants’ exploratory and communicative behaviors predicts infant word learning during early periods of language development. We examine the processes that might explain why this association exists. We suggest that responsiveness supports infants’ growing pragmatic understanding that language is a tool that enables intentions to be socially shared. Additionally, several features of responsiveness—namely, its temporal contiguity, contingency, and multimodal and didactic content—facilitate infants’ mapping of words to their referents and, in turn, growth in vocabulary. We close by examining the generalizability of these processes to infants from diverse cultural communities.

Twenty-Five Years Using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to Study Language Acquisition What Have We Learned?

The intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has proven to be a revolutionary method for the examination of infants’ emerging language knowledge. In the IPLP, infants’ language comprehension is measured by their differential visual fixation to two images presented side-by-side when only one of the images matches an accompanying linguistic stimulus. Researchers can examine burgeoning knowledge in the areas of phonology, semantics, syntax, and morphology in infants not yet speaking. The IPLP enables the exploration of the underlying mechanisms involved in language learning and illuminates how infants identify the correspondences between language and referents in the world. It has also fostered the study of infants’ conceptions of the dynamic events that language will express. Exemplifying translational science, the IPLP is now being investigated for its clinical and diagnostic value.

Reciprocal influences between maternal language and children's language and cognitive development in low-income families.

We examined reciprocal associations between early maternal language use and childrens language and cognitive development in seventy ethnically diverse, low-income families. Mother-child dyads were videotaped when children were aged 2;0 and 3;0. Video transcripts were analyzed for quantity and lexical diversity of maternal and child language. Child cognitive development was assessed at both ages and child receptive vocabulary was assessed at age 3;0. Maternal language related to childrens lexical diversity at each age, and maternal language at age 2;0, was associated with childrens receptive vocabulary and cognitive development at age 3;0. Furthermore, childrens cognitive development at age 2;0 was associated with maternal language at age 3;0 controlling for maternal language at age 2;0, suggesting bi-directionality in mother-child associations. The quantity and diversity of the language children hear at home has developmental implications for children from low-income households. In addition, childrens early cognitive skills further feed into their subsequent language experiences.

Preverbal Infants' Attention to Manner and Path: Foundations for Learning Relational Terms.

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a path, and then tested on events that changed the manner, path, both, or neither. Infants detected each type of change, but only the girls showed evidence of processing manner and path as independent features. This gender difference provides clues about the universal development of manner and path concepts from more basic perceptual skills. Results have implications for how representations of linguistically relevant semantic elements develop conceptually.

Prelinguistic foundations of verb learning: Infants discriminate and categorize dynamic human actions.

Action categorization is necessary for human cognition and is foundational to learning verbs, which label categories of actions and events. In two studies using a nonlinguistic preferential looking paradigm, 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants were tested on their ability to discriminate and categorize a dynamic human manner of motion (i.e., way in which a figure moves; e.g., marching). Study 1 results reveal that infants can discriminate a change in path and actor across instances of the same manner of motion. Study 2 results suggest that infants categorize the manner of motion for dynamic human events even under conditions in which other components of the event change, including the actors path and the actor. Together, these two studies extend prior research on infant action categorization of animated motion events by providing evidence that infants can categorize dynamic human actions, a skill foundational to the learning of motion verbs.

Does the Owl Fly out of the Tree or Does the Owl Exit the Tree Flying? How L2 Learners Overcome Their L1 Lexicalization Biases.

ABSTRACT Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as ascender (‘to move upward’) and salir (‘to go out’), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., run, jog) and expresses path in prepositional phrases (e.g., out of the barn). The way in which a language encodes an event is known as its lexicalization pattern or bias. Using a written sentence elicitation task, we asked whether adult Spanish learners whose L1 was English adopted Spanish lexicalization biases, and what types of L2 exposure facilitated the learning of lexicalization biases. Results showed that advanced, but not intermediate, adult Spanish learners showed a path bias comparable to that found in native speakers of Spanish. Furthermore, study abroad experience is associated with better acquisition of L2 lexicalization biases when describing certain types of events.