Tamar Keren-Portnoy

Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and English-Welsh bilingual infants

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered.

From phonetics to phonology: the emergence of first words in Italian.

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0.9 or 0.10 to 2.0--two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of consonant variegation in babble, are found to predict rate of lexical advance and to relate to the form of the early words. In addition, each childs lexical profile is analyzed to test the hypothesis of non-linearity in phonological development. All of the children show the expected pattern of phonological advance: Relatively accurate first word production is followed by lexical expansion, characterized by a decrease in accuracy and an increase of similarity between word forms. We interpret such a profile as reflecting the emergence of word templates, a first step in phonological organization.

Supporting Early Vocabulary Development: What Sort of Responsiveness Matters?

Maternal responsiveness has been positively related with a range of socioemotional and cognitive outcomes including language. A substantial body of research has explored different aspects of verbal responsiveness. However, perhaps because of the many ways in which it can be operationalized, there is currently a lack of consensus around what type of responsiveness is most helpful for later language development. The present study sought to address this problem by considering both the semantic and temporal dimensions of responsiveness on a single cohort while controlling for level of parental education and the overall amount of communication on the part of both the caregiver and the infant. We found that only utterances that were both semantically appropriate and temporally linked to an infant vocalization were related to infant expressive vocabulary at 18 mo.

British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli

The word segmentation paradigm originally designed by Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) has been widely used to examine how infants from the age of 7.5 months can extract novel words from continuous speech. Here we report a series of 13 studies conducted independently in two British laboratories, showing that British English-learning infants aged 8-10.5 months fail to show evidence of word segmentation when tested in this paradigm. In only one study did we find evidence of word segmentation at 10.5 months, when we used an exaggerated infant-directed speech style. We discuss the impact of variations in infant-directed style within and across languages in the course of language acquisition.

When do infants begin recognizing familiar words in sentences

Previous studies have shown that by 11 but not by 10 months infants recognize words that have become familiar from everyday life independently of the experimental setting. This study explored the ability of 10-, 11-, and 12-month-old infants to recognize familiar words in sentential context, without experimental training. The headturn preference procedure was used to contrast passages containing words likely to be familiar to the infants with passages containing words unlikely to have been previously heard. Two stimulus words were inserted near the beginning and end of each of a set of simple sentence frames. The ability to recognize the familiar words within sentences emerged only at 12 months of age. The contrast between segmentation abilities as they emerge as a result of everyday exposure to language, as assessed here, and those abilities as measured in studies in which words are experimentally trained is discussed in terms of memory-based mechanisms.

The Structure of Arguments

An important tool for scientific study in any field is a formal language in which the phenomena can be described and hypotheses formulated. In this book a formal notation is developed for the description of the cognitive structure of arguments. The analyses based on this notation are more fine-grained than the analyses in previous attempts, and they are applicable not only to arguments but to all types of moves in a discourse. Further, the notational system provides a basis for the description of relations between arguments and the structure of the discourse as a whole. In the final chapter, some empirical studies of retention of arguments in memory and of precis writing are reported, based on hypotheses formulated in terms of the notational system.

Making Sense of Infant Familiarity and Novelty Responses to Words at Lexical Onset.

This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames’ (1988) developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

The Emergence of Phonology: Introduction: the emergence of phonology: whole-word approaches, cross-linguistic evidence

Whole-word phonology is a particular approach to early phonological development. This volume is designed to bring together the classic papers which gave rise to it in the 1970s and current studies that build on and extend the model, which in essence took an emergentist and usage-based stance before its time; the book will make no attempt to cover other approaches to phonological development in any systematic way. Many of the papers, including Vihman and Croft (2007, this volume, Chapter 2), with which we begin, use the term “template” to refer to child-specific word patterns identifiable within the first year of word use. Templates, referred to sporadically in the earlier developmental literature (e.g.,Menn 1983, this volume, Chapter 6) and given formal status for adult linguistic analyses in Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1995), are a more focused expression of the ideas formulated by Waterson (1971, this volume, Chapter 3), Ferguson and Farwell (1975, this volume, Chapter 4), and Macken (1979, this volume, Chapter 5), which provided the core of the whole-word phonology idea (see Vihman and Croft 2007, this volume, Chapter 2, for a summary of the basic arguments). This volume is restricted to the study of early word production and the phonological patterning that can be seen in that domain. The year in which the first of our “setting papers” was written – Waterson (1971, this volume, Chapter 3) – also marks the year of publication of the first study of infant speech perception (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, andVigorito 1971). Since then, perception studies have solidly documented infants’ remarkable early discriminatory capacities and the rapid advances in knowledge of the ambient language that follow over the first year of life (see Jusczyk 1997; Kuhl 2004; and Vihman forthcoming 2014 for reviews), while numerous studies demonstrating infant statistical learning (in language and other areas) from an early age have expanded our understanding of the learning mechanism that may underlie those advances (see Thiessen and Saffran 2007, and Johnson and Tyler 2010 for alternative positions on the role of statistical learning; Vihman forthcoming 2014: ch. 5 provides an overview). In addition, several distinct methodological procedures have been used to trace and explore the nature of early word-form learning over the first two years of life. The resultant studies are of evident relevance to phonological development but none are included here, as the addition of even a few would result in a far

The role of production practice in lexical and phonological development--a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's 'Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children'.

Carol Stoel-Gammon has made a real contribution in bringing together two fields that are not generally jointly addressed. Like Stoel-Gammon, we have long focused on individual differences in phonological development (e.g. Vihman, Ferguson & Elbert, 1986; Vihman, Boysson-Bardies, Durand & Sundberg, 1994; Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman, 2008). And like her, we have been closely concerned with the relationship between lexical and phonological learning. Accordingly, we will focus our discussion on two areas covered by Stoel-Gammon (this issue) on which our current work may shed some additional light.

The dynamics of syntax acquisition: facilitation between syntactic structures

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers learning Hebrew as their first language. We use regression analysis, a method that has not been used to study this phenomenon. We find that the proportion of errors among the earliest produced clauses in a structure is related to the degree of acceleration of that structures learning curve; that with the accretion of structures the proportion of errors among the first clauses of new structures declines, as does the acceleration of their learning curves. We interpret our findings as showing that learning new syntactic structures is made easier, or facilitated, by previously acquired ones.