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Early word learning involves mapping individual words to their meanings and building organized semantic representations among words. Previous corpus-based studies (e.g., using text from websites, newspapers, child-directed speech corpora) demonstrated that linguistic information such as word co-occurrence alone is sufficient to build semantically organized word knowledge. The present study explored two new research directions to advance understanding of how infants acquire semantically organized word knowledge. First, infants in the real world hear words surrounded by contextual information. Going beyond inferring semantic knowledge merely from language input, we examined the role of extra-linguistic contextual information in learning semantic knowledge. Second, previous research relies on large amounts of linguistic data to demonstrate in-principle learning, which is unrealistic compared with the input children receive. Here, we showedthat incorporating extra-linguistic information provides an efficient mechanism through which semantic knowledge can be acquired with a small amount of data infants perceive in everyday learning contexts, such as toy play.

Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes—one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size.

All languages have demonstratives—grammatical words like ‘this' and ‘that' in English, which are a universal tool to establish joint attention on a referent. Demonstratives are acquired early, but their mature use has a protracted development, with recent studies showing that 10- and 11-year-old children do not yet use demonstratives like adults do. Here we investigated demonstrative use by teenagers (ages 12-17) and adults with a focus on two social parameters affecting demonstrative choice in Spanish: Listener Position and Listener Attention. The results of two experiments using an online demonstrative-choice task revealed that teenagers use Spanish demonstratives comparably to adults in most conditions. However, teenagers seem to still be adjusting the relative weight of the social parameters affecting demonstrative choice in Spanish, supporting the view that acquiring and regularly using demonstratives trains social cognition through communicative interaction.

In order to understand early word learning we need to better understand and quantify properties of the input that young children receive. We extended the human simulation paradigm (HSP) using egocentric videos taken from infant head-mounted cameras. The videos were further annotated with gaze information indicating in-the-moment visual attention from the infant. Our new HSP prompted participants for two types of responses, thus differentiating referential from semantic ambiguity in the learning input. Consistent with findings on visual attention in word learning, we find a strongly bimodal distribution over HSP accuracy. Even in this open-ended task, most videos only lead to a small handful of common responses. What's more, referential ambiguity was the key bottleneck to performance: participants can nearly always recover the exact word that was said if they identify the correct referent. Finally, analysis shows that adult learners relied on particular, multimodal behavioral cues to infer those target referents.

Background In recent years, there have been many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) featuring manipulation for frozen shoulder, but there is a lack of new systematic reviews on the efficacy and safety of manipulation for frozen shoulder. Objective To evaluate the efficacy and safety of manipulation in the treatment of frozen shoulder by Meta-analysis, and understand whether "rotation shoulder joint" could affect the effect of manipulative therapy by subgroup. Methods PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline, CNKI, China Biomedical Literature Database, Wanfang Data were searched for RCTs on the efficacy and safety of manipulative therapy for frozen shoulder, with manipulative therapy as the intervention of experimental group and non-pharmacological therapy as the intervention of control group from inception to 2023-03-01. Two investigators extracted data and evaluated the quality. Meta-analysis was performed using Revman 5.3 software. Results A total of 12 RCTs were included in this Meta-analysis, with a total of 893 patients with frozen shoulder, including 451 patients in the experimental group and 442 cases in the control group. Results of Meta-analysis showed that the improvement of VAS by manipulative therapy was better than physical therapy, acupuncture therapy and conventional therapy (SMD=1.09, 95%CI=0.81-1.37, P

The occurrence of malignant tumor is a serious threat to human health and survival, but its pathogenesis and metastasis mechanism are still not very clear. MACC1 is a gene that was found in 2009 to be closely related to the development of colon cancer. The consensus is that MACC1 not only induces the occurrence and metastasis of tumors, but also significantly correlates with the prognosis and survival rate of tumor patients, which is mainly related to the regulation of HGF/c-Met signaling pathway by MACC1. MACC1 is expected to be a new target for tumor gene therapy in the future. In this review, the research progress of MACC1 in the process of tumor development and metastasis was reviewed.

Picture book reading is a common word-learning context from which parents repeatedly name objects to their child and it has been found to facilitate early word learning. To learn the correct word-object mappings in a book-reading context, infants need to be able to link what they see with what they hear. However, given multiple objects on every book page, it is not clear how infants direct their attention to objects named by parents. The aim of the current study is to examine how infants mechanistically discover the correct word-object mappings during book reading in real time. We used head-mounted eye-tracking during parent-infant picture book reading and measured the infant's moment-by-moment visual attention to the named referent. We also examined how gesture cues provided by both the child and the parent may influence infants' attention to the named target. We found that although parents provided many object labels during book reading, infants were not able to attend to the named objects easily. However, their abilities to follow and use gestures to direct the other social partner’s attention increase the chance of looking at the named target during parent naming.

It has been conjectured that verb learning is hard because verb meanings are not readily "packaged'' from the physical world. To provide new empirical evidence on this account, we analyzed egocentric video collected from natural toy-play interaction and focused on the naming events when action verbs were uttered in parent speech. Using the Human Simulation Paradigm, we showed egocentric videos of those naming events to adult observers and asked them to guess the target verb in parent speech. We found that adult observers used many different verbs to describe the same visual event, and only one of them matched with the verb in parent speech. We analyzed mismatched verbs and identified several sources of mismatch, and found that all of the mismatched verbs are relevant to the target verb, but they capture different properties (temporal, semantic, etc) of the visual event. We also found that different naming events for the same verb also differ in terms of the degree of ambiguity. Taken together, the results in the present paper provided new evidence from the child’s view, showing that verb learning is hard not only because multiple possible meanings are embedded in each learning situation, but also because these candidate meanings expand across multiple dimensions of the physical world, overlap with each other, and relate to the target meaning in many different ways.

Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.

Learning verbs is challenging because it is difficult to infer the precise meaning of a verb when there are a multitude of relations that one can derive from a single event. To study this verb learning challenge, we used children's egocentric view collected from naturalistic toy-play interaction as learning materials and investigated how visual and linguistic information provided in individual naming moments as well as cross-situational information provided from multiple learning moments can help learners resolve this mapping problem using the Human Simulation Paradigm. Our results show that learners benefit from seeing children's egocentric views compared to third-person observations. In addition, linguistic information can help learners identify the correct verb meaning by eliminating possible meanings that do not belong to the linguistic category. Learners are also able to integrate visual and linguistic information both within and across learning situations to reduce the ambiguity in the space of possible verb meanings.

Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning.

To acquire the meaning of a verb, language learners not onlyneed to find the correct mapping between a specific verb andan action or event in the world, but also infer the underlyingrelational meaning that the verb encodes. Most verb naminginstances in naturalistic contexts are highly ambiguous as manypossible actions can be embedded in the same scenario andmany possible verbs can be used to describe those actions. Tounderstand whether learners can find the correct verb meaningfrom referentially ambiguous learning situations, we conductedthree experiments using the Human Simulation Paradigm withadult learners. Our results suggest that although finding theright verb meaning from one learning instance is hard, there isa statistical solution to this problem. When provided withmultiple verb learning instances all referring to the same verb,learners are able to aggregate information across situations andgradually converge to the correct semantic space. Even in caseswhere they may not guess the exact target verb, they can stilldiscover the right meaning by guessing a similar verb that issemantically close to the ground truth.