Early on, young children are surrounded by
words, but they do not yet know what these words mean, or how to use the words
themselves. Despite not yet knowing the meanings of words, the experiences and
interactions that surround the usage of these words may drive the emergence of
word knowledge. Laboratory studies, however, are not ideal for examining real-world
experiences. In this novel study, the researchers examined the combination of
factors that were most predictive of word knowledge in a naturalistic
environment.
To collect these data, the researchers conducted
a large-scale, longitudinal observation of a single, typically-developing
child. They collected audio and video recording from all rooms of the child’s
house from birth to age 3 years, adding up to 200,000 hours of data. They
analyzed the space, time, and language context for each word spoken to the
child. For instance, the word “breakfast” was most often spoken in the kitchen,
between 8:00am to 10:00am, and was often spoken with other words such as
“chew”, “yum”, and the child’s name. The main outcome measure was the age at
which individual words were spoken by the child. They found that words produced
in distinct spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts were produced earlier by
the child, suggesting they were easier to learn. These three factors were also strongly
correlated with one another, and were stronger predictors of the age at which
the child first produced a word than how frequently the word was said to the
child.
Taken together, this rich observational study
supports the notion that words produced in more distinctive contexts are
learned earlier. It is important to note that because these data came from one
child, the generalizability of these findings needs to be established.
Nevertheless, this study demonstrates how multimodal data collection is
valuable in understanding language acquisition. The causal structure of
language acquisition is a complex puzzle, but these data provide some evidence
for revealing part of this process.
Blogger:
Nicolette Noonan is a PhD student in Psychology, supervised by Drs. Lisa
Archibald and Marc Joanisse.
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