Susan A. Graham

The Relations between Children's Communicative Perspective-Taking and Executive Functioning.

Two experiments investigated childrens communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document childrens emergent use of the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviors in both a production and comprehension task. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-old children used a speakers perspective to guide their interpretation of instructions. In both experiments, egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with childrens inhibitory control skills. Results of these studies demonstrate that young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus privileged knowledge, and use this information to guide their communicative behaviors. Furthermore, the results suggest that childrens inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partners perspective.

Storytelling as a Foundation to Literacy Development for Aboriginal Children: Culturally and Developmentally Appropriate Practices

There is substantial evidence that Aboriginal youth face serious challenges in schooling, in general, and in literacy development, specifically. Thus, it is essential to design early literacy programmes that engage Aboriginal children and produce positive outcomes. In this article, the authors propose that such programmes include oral storytelling by teachers and students because it is a precursor to reading and writing across cultures and a traditional Aboriginal teaching tool. Moreover, storytelling fits with Aboriginal epistemology—the nature of their knowledge, its foundations, scope, and validity. The authors begin by reviewing a representative sample of the research that has examined the outcomes of early literacy instruction with Aboriginal children. Next, the authors describe Aboriginal epistemology, highlighting the role of the oral tradition. Finally, the authors describe an ongoing study aimed at supporting early literacy development through a developmentally and culturally appropriate oral storytelling instruction programme.

12-Month-Olds’ Phonotactic Knowledge Guides Their Word–Object Mappings

This study examined whether 12-month-olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word-object (N = 30), Japanese word-object (N = 15), or Czech word-object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated. Infants associated CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words, but not CCVC Czech words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that by 12 months of age, infants are beginning to apply their language-specific knowledge to their acceptance of word forms. That is, they will not map words that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects.

Infants' disambiguation of novel object words

When preschool-aged children are presented with two objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and asked for the referent of a novel word, they will consistently map the novel word to the novel object, a tendency called the disambiguation effect. In this study, we examined the relation between vocabulary size and the disambiguation response tendency during late infancy. Sixteen- to 22-month-old infants were presented with a novel object along with two familiar objects and asked to choose the referents of familiar and novel words. The infants who consistently chose the novel object in the presence of a novel word had significantly higher productive vocabularies than those who did not. These two groups, however, did not differ in age or on familiar word trials. These results suggest that emergence of the disambiguation effect in late infancy is related to productive vocabulary size rather than age.

Preschoolers’ sensitivity to referential ambiguity: evidence for a dissociation between implicit understanding and explicit behavior

Four-year-olds were asked to assess an adult listeners knowledge of the location of a hidden sticker after the listener was provided an ambiguous or unambiguous description of the sticker location. When preschoolers possessed private knowledge about the sticker location, the location they chose indicated that they judged a description to be unambiguous even when the message was ambiguous from the listeners perspective. However, measures of implicit awareness (response latencies and eye movement measures) demonstrated that even when preschoolers had private knowledge about the sticker location, ambiguous messages led to more consideration of an alternative location and longer response latencies than unambiguous messages. The findings demonstrate that children show sensitivity to linguistic ambiguity earlier than previously thought and, further, that they can detect linguistic ambiguity in language directed to others even when their own knowledge clarifies the intended meaning.

Salient object parts and infants' acquisition of novel object words

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the early acquisition of object labels is facilitated by the presence of perceptually salient object parts. Twenty-two infants (mean age = 1;8.21 years) participated in four lexical training sessions during which they were introduced to two types of object words: words whose referents possessed one salient part (e.g., peacock) and words whose referents had no salient parts (e.g., pigeon) as rated by adult judges. Multiple-choice comprehension tests were administered at the end of each session to assess word learning. A generaliz ation task was also administered to examine the status of object parts in determining word extension. The results indicated that the words whose referents possessed a salient part were learned more easily than those whose referents did not possess a salient part. The magnitude of this effect was related to the size of childrens vocabularies, but not to the age of the children. These findings support the hypothesis that salient object parts contribute to the acquisition of object labels in the early stages of lexical development.

The role of shape similarity in toddlers’ lexical extensions

The taxonomic assumption, or noun-category bias, is thought to facilitate word learning by focusing children’ s attention on taxonomic categories as likely candidates for word meanings. Three experiments were conducted to disentangle the role of taxonomic relations and shape similarity in 18- and 24-month-olds’ responses on a noun category bias task. The relationship between vocabulary composition and performance on these tasks was also examined. Results indicated that both 18- and 24-month-old children were predominantly guided by shape similarity when extending novel labels. However, some evidence that taxonomic information can be used to guide word extension was found in the 24-month-old group. Those children with a larger proportion of nouns in their vocabulary were more likely to use information about category membership when extending words, even in the absence of shape similarity. The challenge that a young child faces when learning a new word is illustrated clearly by Quine’ s (1960) ‘ problem of radical translation’ . According to Quine, when a word is uttered, its referent is ambiguous. Consider Quine’ s example of an anthropologist visiting a radically different culture on Earth. He observes a speaker utter ‘ gavagai’ as a rabbit runs by and faces the dilemma of assigning the correct meaning to the utterance. In this context, ‘ gavagai’ could have countless referents, including ‘ fast’ , ‘ running’ , ‘ rabbit’ , ‘ tail’ etc. Similarly, young children encounter the formidable task of identifying the specie c referent for words produced in their environment. Yet, despite the apparent complexity of this task, children learn language at a remarkably rapid pace, acquiring an average of six words a day between the ages of 2 and 6 years (Nelson, 1973).

Words Are Not Merely Features: Only Consistently Applied Nouns Guide 4-year-olds' Inferences About Object Categories

Although there is considerable evidence that nouns highlight category-based commonalities, including both those that are perceptually available and those that reflect underlying conceptual similarity, some have claimed that words function merely as features of objects. Here, we directly test these alternative accounts. Four-year-olds (n = 140) were introduced to two different novel animals that were highlighted with nouns, adjectives, or stickers. Children heard a nonobvious novel property applied to the first animal and were asked whether this property applied to other animals that filled the similarity space between the original two animals. When the two animals were named with the same noun, children extended the property broadly throughout the similarity space. When the animals were marked with adjectives or stickers, children adopted a similarity-based pattern. These findings demonstrate clearly that nouns exert a unique effect on categorization—they promote category formation and engage conceptual reasoning beyond perceptual similarity alone.

24-Month-Olds’ Selective Learning Is Not an All-or-None Phenomenon

Evidence that children maintain some memories of labels that are unlikely to be shared by the broader linguistic community suggests that children’s selective learning is not an all-or-none phenomenon. Across three experiments, we examine the contexts in which 24-month-olds show selective learning and whether they adjust their selective learning if provided with cues of in-context relevance. In each experiment, toddlers were first familiarized with a source who acted on familiar objects in either typical or atypical ways (e.g., used a car to mimic driving or hop like a rabbit) or labeled familiar objects incorrectly (e.g., called a spoon a “brush”). The source then labeled unfamiliar objects using either a novel word (e.g., fep; Experiment 1) or sound (e.g., ring; Experiments 2 and 3). Results indicated that toddlers learnt words from the typical source but not from the atypical or inaccurate source. In contrast, toddlers extended sound labels only when a source who had previously acted atypically provided the sound labels. Thus, toddlers, like preschoolers, avoid forming semantic representations of new object labels that are unlikely to be relevant in the broader community, but will form event-based memories of such labels if they have reason to suspect such labels will have in-context relevance.

Class matters: 12‐month‐olds’ word–object associations privilege content over function words

A fundamental step in learning words is the development of an association between a sound pattern and an element in the environment. Here we explore the nature of this associative ability in 12-month-olds, examining whether it is constrained to privilege particular word forms over others. Forty-eight infants were presented with sets of novel English content-like word-object pairings (e.g. fep) or novel English function-like word-object (e.g. iv) pairings until they habituated. Results indicated that infants associated novel content-like words, but not the novel function-like words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that the mechanism with which basic word-object associations are formed is remarkably sophisticated by the onset of productive language. That is, mere associative pairings are not sufficient to form mappings. Rather the system requires well-formed noun-like words to co-occur with objects in order for the linkages to arise.