Showing papers by "Lila R. Gleitman published in 2013"
TL;DR: Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.
Abstract: Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents’ words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents’ words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children’s vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.
273 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing.
236 citations
11 Mar 2013
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the grammatical distinction between count and mass nouns and its relation to the distinction between objects and stuff, and show that learning count/mass syntax may help children think about objects and things in ways that were not antecedently available to them.
Abstract: What is the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive categories? How does language acquisition (specifically, the acquisition of grammatical categories) draw on prelinguistic concepts? Is it possible, as recent commentators have argued, that the acquisition of linguistic categories itself affects nonlinguistic conceptual categories? This paper addresses these questions by focusing on the grammatical distinction between count and mass nouns and its relation to the distinction between objects and stuff. We first ask whether learning count/mass syntax may help children think about objects and stuff in ways that were not antecedently available to them. We also ask whether cross-linguistic differences in marking count/mass status affect the nonlinguistic individuation criteria used by speakers of different languages. We review a number of recent findings that have been interpreted as showing such effects of count/mass syntax on nonlinguistic cognition and argue that they do not conclusively demonstrate language-specific influences on mental life.
40 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This work evaluates the way learners exploit observational word learning situations within two experiments, employing the standard paradigm of psychologically investigating cross- situational word learning and argues for an account of a multiple-proposal memory rather than a multiple co-occurrence memory.
11 citations