Search

Contains fulltext : 294424.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) While there are well-known demonstrations that children can use distributional information to acquire multiple components of language, the underpinnings of these achievements are unclear. In the current paper, we investigate the potential pre-requisites for a distributional learning model that can explain how children learn their first words. We review existing literature and then present the results of a series of computational simulations with Vector Space Models, a type of distributional semantic model used in Computational Linguistics, which we evaluate against vocabulary acquisition data from children. We focus on nouns and verbs, and we find that: (i) a model with flexibility to adjust for the frequency of events provides a better fit to the human data, (ii) the influence of context words is very local, especially for nouns, and (iii) words that share more contexts with other words are harder to learn. 20 juni 2023 20 p.

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

Background: Probiotics may enhance the effects of exogenous oestrogens such as hormone replacement therapy and isoflavones, and may lead to improvements in menopausal symptoms, and cardiovascular, bone and vaginal health. Objectives: To examine the effects of probiotics on oestrogen-related pathologies and explore whether probiotics influence the effects of exogenous oestrogenic substances. Search strategy: Searches of EMBASE, MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Web of Science were performed. Selection criteria: Studies reported on the effects of probiotics, or probiotics plus oestrogenic substances such as estriol or isoflavones, among perimenopausal or recently postmenopausal women. Data collection & analysis: All findings were narratively synthesised; 7 studies were examined via meta-analysis which examined the effects of probiotics versus placebo. Main results: Thirty-nine studies contributed data from 3,187 women. Probiotics were associated with improvements in menopausal symptoms, urogenital conditions, bone health, and enhancements in the efficacy and safety of estriol and isoflavones. Meta analysis demonstrated large effects of probiotics on menopausal symptoms (total score): [standardised mean difference (SMD)= -0.82, (95% CI -0.52 to -1.09)], vasomotor symptoms: [SMD= -0.96, (95% CI -1.25 to -0.68)], psychological symptoms: [SMD=-0.51, (95% CI -0.95 to -0.08)], vaginal dryness: [SMD=-0.95 (95% CI -1.40 to -0.49)], and vaginal microbiome health (Nugent score): [SMD=-0.91 (95% CI -1.32 to -0.49)]. Meta analysis results were nonsignificant in relation to somatic and sexual symptoms. Conclusions: Findings suggest that probiotics may improve conditions related to low oestrogen levels. Moreover, probiotics may enhance the effects of estriol and isoflavones. While findings are limited by the high risks of bias in the included studies, these results are promising and require further investigation.

This paper presents the first part of a guide for documenting and describing child language, child-directed language and socialization patterns in diverse languages and cultures. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students. We assume some basic familiarity with language documentation principles and methods, and, based on this, provide step-by-step suggestions for collecting, analyzing and presenting child data. This first part of the guide focuses on constructing a sketch corpus that consists of minimally five hours of annotated and archived data and which documents communicative practices of children between the ages of 2 and 4.

This paper presents the second part of a guide for documenting and describing child language, child-directed language and socialization patterns in diverse languages and cultures. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students. We assume some basic familiarity with language documentation principles and methods, and, based on this, provide step-by-step suggestions for collecting, analyzing and presenting child data. This second part of the guide focuses on developing a child language acquisition sketch. It takes the sketch corpus as its basis (which was introduced in the first part of this guide), and presents a model for analyzing and describing the corpus data.

Additional file 4. Example of the Icelandic word familiarization and grammar training tasks.

Additional file 1. Overview of adaptive set-up of the artificial language learning task.

Like many Indigenous Australian languages, Murrinhpatha has flexible word order with no apparent configurational syntax. We analyzed an experimental corpus of Murrinhpatha utterances for associations between different thematic role orders, intonational phrasing patterns and pitch downtrends. We found that initial constituents (Agents or Patients) tend to carry the highest pitch targets (HiF0), followed by patterns of downstep and declination. Sentence-final verbs always have lower Hif0 values than either initial or medial Agents or Patients. Thematic role order does not influence intonational patterns, with the results suggesting that Murrinhpatha has positional prosody, although final nominals can disrupt global pitch downtrends regardless of thematic role.

Additional file 2. List of Icelandic nouns.

Additional file 3. Icelandic grammar rules.

Theories of language acquisition vary significantly in their assumptions regarding the content of children’s early syntactic representations and how they subsequently develop towards the adult state. An important methodological tool in tapping syntactic knowledge is priming. In the current paper, we report the first longitudinal investigation of syntactic priming in children, to test the competing predictions of three different theoretical accounts. A sample of 106 children completed a syntactic priming task testing the English active/passive alternation every six months from 36 months to 54 months of age. We tracked both the emergence and development of the abstract priming effect and lexical boost effect. The lexical boost effect emerged late and increased in magnitude over development, whilst the abstract priming effect emerged early and, in a subsample of participants who produced at least one passive at 36 months, decreased in magnitude over time. In addition, there was substantial variation in the emergence of abstract priming amongst our sample, which was significantly predicted by language proficiency measured six months prior. We conclude that children’s representation of the passive is abstracted early, with lexically dependent priming coming online only later in development. The results are best explained by an implicit learning account of acquisition (Chang, F., Dell, G., S., & Bock, K. 2006. Becoming Syntactic. Psychological Review, 113, 234–272), which induces dynamic syntactic representations from the input that continue to change across developmental time.

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons.

Much of Lieven’s pioneering work has helped move the study of individual differences to the centre of child language research. The goal of the present chapter is to illustrate how the study of individual differences provides crucial insights into the language acquisition process. In part one, we summarise some of the evidence showing how pervasive individual differences are across the whole of the language system; from gestures to morphosyntax. In part two, we describe three causal factors implicated in explaining individual differences, which, we argue, must be built into any theory of language acquisition (intrinsic differences in the neurocognitive learning mechanisms, the child’s communicative environment, and developmental cascades in which each new linguistic skill that the child has to acquire depends critically on the prior acquisition of foundational abilities). In part three, we present an example study on the role of the speed of linguistic processing on vocabulary development, which illustrates our approach to individual differences. The results suggest a key role for the input in vocabulary acquisition, not only directly, by providing children with more opportunities for learning a greater diversity of words, but also indirectly, by increasing processing capacity, and thus speeding up the learning of new words. The results also show evidence of a changing relationship between lexical processing speed and vocabulary over developmental time, perhaps as a result of the changing nature of the structure of the lexicon. The study thus highlights the benefits of an individual differences approach in building, testing, and constraining theories of language acquisition.

Item does not contain fulltext Continuous vector word representations (or word embeddings) have shown success in capturing semantic relations between words, as evidenced by evaluation against behavioral data of adult performance on semantic tasks (Pereira et al., 2016). Adult semantic knowledge is the endpoint of a language acquisition process; thus, a relevant question is whether these models can also capture emerging word representations of young language learners. However, the data for children’s semantic knowledge across development is scarce. In this paper, we propose to bridge this gap by using Age of Acquisition norms to evaluate word embeddings learnt from child-directed input. We present two methods that evaluate word embeddings in terms of (a) the semantic neighbourhood density of learnt words, and (b) convergence to adult word associations. We apply our methods to bag-of-words models, and find that (1) children acquire words with fewer semantic neighbours earlier, and (2) young learners only attend to very local context. These findings provide converging evidence for validity of our methods in understanding the prerequisite features for a distributional model of word learning. Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2020) (2020, 19 November)

Item does not contain fulltext