Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-zlgnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T18:16:44.885Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child- versus adult-directed language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2012

THOMAS HILLS
THOMAS HILLS*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
*
Address for correspondence: Thomas Hills, University of Warwick, Department of Psychology, Gibett Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. tel: +44-(0) 24-7652-3183. e-mail: t.t.hills@warwick.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at children aged 1 ; 0 to 5 ; 0, and two adult-directed corpora representing spoken and written language. Statistics were adjusted relative to shuffled corpora. Child-directed language was found to be more associative, repetitive and consistent than adult-directed language. Moreover, these statistical properties of child-directed language better predicted word acquisition than the same statistics in adult-directed language. Word frequency and repetitions were the best predictors within word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and function words). For all word classes combined, associative structure, contextual diversity and word repetitions best predicted language acquisition. These results support the hypothesis that child-directed language is structured in ways that facilitate language acquisition.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 586 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

[*]

I thank Linda Smith, Josita Maouene, Brian Riordon, Peter Todd, Thorstun Pachur and Sara Hills for suggestions and comments on the research and manuscript. I also thank Fionniain Hills for the banjo–violin example. This work was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (100014 130397/1).

References

REFERENCES

Block, N. (1999). Functional role semantics. In Wilson, R. A. & Keil, F. C. (eds), MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences, 331–32. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brown, P. (2008). Verb specificity and argument realization in Tzeltal child language. In Bowerman, M. & Brown, P. (eds), Cross linguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability, 167–90. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1990). On the pragmatics of contrast. Journal of Child Language 17, 417–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Collins, A. M. & Quillian, M. R. (1969). Retrieval time from semantic memory. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 8, 240–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dale, P. S. & Fenson, L. (1996). Lexical development norms for young children. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 28, 125–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, J. W. & Englebretson, R. (2000–2005). Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Ferguson, C. A. (1964). Baby talk in six languages. American Anthropologist 66, 103–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firth, J. R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930–1955. Studies in Linguistic Analysis. Special volume of the Philological Society, 1–32. Oxford: Philological Society.Google Scholar
Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L. & Lederer, A. (1999). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition 73, 135–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 1, 3–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M. & Rogosky, B. (2003). Conceptual interrelatedness and caricatures. Memory & Cognition 31, 169–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S. & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 35, 515–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grimshaw, J. (1981). Form, function and the language acquisition device. In Baker, C. L. & McCarthy, J. (eds), The logical problem of language acquisition, 163–82. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hayes, D. P. & Ahrens, M. G. (1988). Vocabulary simplification for children: A special case of ‘motherese’? Journal of Child Language 15, 395–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hayes, J. R. & Clark, H. H. (1970). Experiments in the segmentation of an artificial speech analog. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language, 221–34. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Hills, T., Maouene, M., Maouene, J., Sheya, A. & Smith, L. (2009). Longitudinal analysis of early semantic networks: Preferential attachment or preferential acquisition? Psychological Science 20, 729–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hills, T., Maouene, J., Riordan, B. & Smith, L. (2010). The associative structure of language: Contextual diversity in early word learning. Journal of Memory and Language 63, 259–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff, E. & Naigles, L. (2002). How children use input to acquire a lexicon. Child Development 73, 418–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hurtado, N., Marchman, V. A. & Fernald, A. (2008). Does input influence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed and vocabulary size in Spanish-learning children. Developmental Science 11, F31–F39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M. & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology 27, 236–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, M. N. & Mewhort, D. J. K. (2007). Representing word meaning and order information in a composite holographic lexicon. Psychological Review 104, 1–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kachergis, G., Yu, C. & Shiffrin, R. M. (2012). An associative model of adaptive inference for learning word–referent mappings. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 19, 317–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landauer, T. K. & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review 104, 211–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenat, D. B. & Feigenbaum, E. A. (1991). On the thresholds of knowledge. Artificial Intelligence 47, 185–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, P., Farkas, I. & MacWhinney, B. (2004). Early lexical development in a self-organizing neural network. Neural Networks 17, 1345–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lund, K. & Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 28, 203–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maouene, J., Laakso, A. & Smith, L. B. (2011). Object associations of early-learned light and heavy English verbs. First Language 31, 109–132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Markman, E. M. (1984). The acquisition and hierarchical organization of categories by children. In Sophian, N. C. (ed.), Origins of cognitive skills: The 18th annual Carnegie symposium on cognition, 276–406. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Mather, E. & Plunkett, K. (2012). The role of novelty in early word learning. Cognitive Science. [Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01239.x]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. R. & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language 25, 95–120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L. & Schreiber, T. A. (1998). The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment norms. Retrieved from http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation.Google Scholar
Newman, R. (2008). The level of detail in infants' word learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, 229–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newport, E. L., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, 109–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plaut, D. C. & Kello, C. T. (1999). The emergence of phonology from the interplay of speech comprehension and production: A distributed connectionist approach. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Carnegie Mellon symposium on cognition, May 1997, Pittsburgh, PA, US, 381–415. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Recchia, G., Johns, B. T. & Jones, M. N. (2008). Context repetition benefits are dependent on context redundancy. In Sloutsky, V., Love, B. & McRae, K. (eds), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 267–72. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Riordan, B. & Jones, M. N. (2007). Comparing semantic space models using child-directed speech. In McNamara, D. S. & Trafton, J. G. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 599–604. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Riordon, B. & Jones, M. N. (2011). Redundancy in perceptual and linguistic experience: Comparing feature-based and distributional models of semantic representation. Topics in Cognitive Science 3, 303–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language 35, 185–205.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N. and Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L. & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 606–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saussure, F. de (1959). Course in general linguistics, trans. W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. (Original work published in 1916).Google Scholar
Smith, L. & Yu, C. (2008). Infants rapidly learn word–referent mappings via cross-situational statistics. Cognition 106, 1558–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snow, C. (1972). Mothers' speech to children learning language. Cognitive Development 43, 549–65.Google Scholar
Steyvers, M. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2005). The large-scale structure of semantic networks: Statistical analyses and a model of semantic growth. Cognitive Science 29, 41–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vincent-Smith, L., Bricker, D. & Bricker, W. (1974). Acquisition of receptive vocabulary in the child. Child Development 45, 189–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Klibanoff, R. S. (2000). The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives. Developmental Psychology 36, 571–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yu, C. & Smith, L. B. (2007). Rapid word learning under uncertainty via cross-situational statistics. Psychological Science 18, 414–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed