Nameera Akhtar

Acquiring Basic Word Order: Evidence for Data-Driven Learning of Syntactic Structure.

Recent studies indicate that young English-speaking children do not have a general understanding of the significance of SVO order in reversible sentences; that is, they seem to rely on verb-specific formulas (e.g. NPpusher-form of the verb PUSH-NPpushee) to interpret such sentences (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997). This finding raises the possibility that young children may be open to learning non-SVO structures with novel transitive verbs. To test this hypothesis, 12 children in each of three age groups (two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and four-year-olds) were taught novel verbs, one in each of three sentence positions: medial (SVO), final (SOV), and initial (VSO). The younger age groups were equally likely to use the novel (non-English) orders spontaneously as to correct them to SVO order, whereas the oldest children consistently corrected these structures to SVO order. These results suggest that English-speaking childrens acquisition of a truly general understanding of SVO order may be a gradual process involving generalization (learning) from examples. The findings are discussed in terms of recent data-driven learning accounts of grammar acquisition.

Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology.

Four studies examined English-speaking childrens productivity with word order and verb morphology. Two- and 3-year-olds were taught novel transitive verbs with experimentally controlled argument structures. The younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with these verbs; older children comprehended and used word order correctly to mark agents and patients of the novel verbs. Children as young as 2 years 1 month added -ing but not -ed to verb stems; older children were productive with both inflections. These studies demonstrate that the present progressive inflection is used productively before the regular past tense marker and suggest that productivity with word order may be independent of developments in verb morphology. The findings are discussed in terms of M. Tomasellos (1992a) Verb Island hypothesis and M. Rispolis (1991) notion of the mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations.

Two-year-olds use pragmatic cues to differentiate reference to objects and actions☆

Abstract Previous studies have found that children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine “which one” of several objects or “which one’ of several actions an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. The current studies attempted to determine whether children can also use such cues to determine “what kind” of referent, object, or action, an adult intends to indicate. In the first study, 27-month-old children heard an adult use a nonce word in conjunction with a nameless object while it was engaged in a nameless action. The discourse situation leading into this naming event was manipulated so that in one condition the target action was the one new element in the discourse context at the time of the naming event, and in another condition the target object was the one new element. Results showed that children learned the new word for whichever element was new to the discourse context. The second study followed this same general method, but in this case children in one condition watched as an adult engaged in preparatory behaviors that indicated her desire that the child perform the action before she produced the novel word, whereas children in another condition saw no such preparation. Results showed that children who saw the action preparation learned the new word for the action, whereas children who saw no preparation learned the new word for the object. These two studies demonstrate the important role of social-pragmatic information in early word learning, and suggest that if there is a Whole Object assumption in early lexical acquisition, it is an assumption that may be very easily overridden.

Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs

A fundamental question of child language acquisition is childrens productivity with newly learned forms. The current study addressed this question experimentally with children just beginning to combine words. Ten children between 1;6 and 1;11 were taught four new words, two nouns and two verbs, over multiple sessions. All four words were modelled in minimal syntactic contexts. The experimenter gave children multiple opportunities to produce the words and made attempts to elicit morphological endings (plural for nouns, past tense for verbs). Overall, children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs-by many orders of magnitude. Several children also pluralized a newly learned noun, whereas none of them formed a past tense with a newly learned verb. A follow-up study using a slightly different methodology confirmed the finding of limited syntactic productivity with verbs. Hypotheses accounting for this asymmetry in the early use of nouns and verbs are discussed.

Cognitive and linguistic correlates of early exposure to more than one language.

This chapter reviews recent studies of cognitive and linguistic correlates of exposure to two languages in infancy and early childhood. Most of the studies reviewed directly compare monolingual children to those who are exposed to two languages. The cognitive correlates include enhanced executive functioning (especially inhibitory control), and Theory of Mind. The linguistic correlates include smaller vocabularies in each language, different word-learning strategies, slower lexical access, and enhanced pragmatic and metalinguistic skills. Issues in interpreting group differences, in particular, whether such differences should be interpreted as deficits, are discussed.

Orienting to third­party conversations

Children as young as two years of age are able to learn novel object labels through overhearing, even when distracted by an attractive toy (Akhtar, 2005). The present studies varied the information provided about novel objects and examined which elements (i.e. novel versus neutral information and labels versus facts) toddlers chose to monitor, and what type of information they were more likely to learn. In Study 1, participants learned only the novel label and the novel fact containing a novel label. In Study 2, only girls learned the novel label. Neither girls nor boys learned the novel fact. In both studies, analyses of childrens gaze patterns suggest that children who learned the new information strategically oriented to the third-party conversation.

What paradox? A response to Naigles (2002)

The supposed paradox is that even prelinguistic infants find abstract patterns in speechlike stimuli with relative ease in statistical learning experiments, whereas children struggle well into the preschool years to find abstract syntactic patterns in experiments involving meaningful language. But the obvious point is that the findings on statistical learning are about infants’ skills of auditory perception, not language processing. Thus, infants find patterns in other kinds of auditory stimuli, for example, musical tones (Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, & Newport, 1999), and they even show the same ability with sequentially presented visual stimuli such as colored lights turning on and off (Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, in press). And then there is the fact that tamarin monkeys find patterns in speech-like stimuli in much the same way as human infants (Hauser, Weiss, & Marcus, 2002). These facts (the latter two not cited by Naigles) are of crucial importance in establishing just what is going on in the statistical learning experiments, namely, that all kinds of primates, including humans, are incredibly skillful at finding patterns in all kinds of perceptual stimuli. These pattern-finding skills comprise a necessary component in children’s acquisition of language – children could not learn the meaningful syntactic constructions of a natural language without them – and so their existence in prelinguistic infants is among the most important discoveries in recent years in the study of child language acquisition. But nobody, not even Naigles, thinks that infants in the statistical learning experiments are processing language, and so it is a bit odd to compare infants’ ease of perceptual pattern finding in these studies with their difficulties in finding patterns among meaningful syntactic constructions a year or more later. There is no paradox. M. Tomasello, N. Akhtar / Cognition 88 (2003) 317–323 317

Learning Words from Labeling and Directive Speech.

Despite the common intuition that labeling may be the best way to teach a new word to a child, systematic testing is needed of the prediction that children learn words better from labeling utterances than from directive utterances. Two experiments compared toddlers’ label learning in the context of hearing words used in directive versus labeling utterances. In Study 1 (N = 64) 24-month-olds learned a novel label equally well from directive and labeling utterances, whereas 18-month-olds only learned in the labeling context. When the novel label was placed at the end of a directive utterance in Study 2 (N = 16), even 18-month-olds were able to learn it. These findings highlight young children’s flexibility in interpreting words in a variety of contexts, and the importance of considering the various linguistic and non-linguistic settings where words are encountered.

Two-year-olds' productivity with verbal inflections *

Previous research has examined childrens ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1;9 to 2;10 (N = 34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In Experiment 1, children added -ed and -ing to novel stems, and dropped them from novel inflected forms and did so largely appropriately. In Experiment 2, they dropped -ing from verbs, but not from nouns, suggesting that when young children drop inflections they tend to do so appropriately, and not simply for ease of pronunciation.

Language experience and preschoolers' foreign word learning

Four-year-old English speakers (N = 48) who were monolingual, bilingual, or regularly exposed to a second language were taught what they were told were foreign labels for familiar and novel objects. When task demands were low, there was no difference in word learning among the three groups. However, when task demands were higher, bilinguals learned more words than monolingual children, and exposed childrens performance fell between the two. These findings indicate that the bilingual word learning advantage seen in adults may begin as early as the preschool years.