Modified items

Despite the efficiency with which language users typically process spoken language, a growing body of research finds substantial individual differences in both the speed and accuracy of spoken language processing potentially attributable to participants’ literacy skills. Against this background, the current study took a look at the role of word reading skill in listeners’ anticipation of upcoming spoken language input in children at the cusp of learning to read; if reading skills affect predictive language processing, then children at this stage of literacy acquisition should be most susceptible to the effects of reading skills on spoken language processing. We tested 8-year-olds on their prediction of upcoming spoken language input in an eye-tracking task. Although children, like in previous studies to date, were successfully able to anticipate upcoming spoken language input, there was a strong positive correlation between children’s word reading skills (but not their pseudo-word reading and meta-phonological awareness or their spoken word recognition skills) and their prediction skills. We suggest that these findings are most compatible with the notion that the process of learning orthographic representations during reading acquisition sharpens pre-existing lexical representations, which in turn also supports anticipation of upcoming spoken words.

While there are numerous studies that investigate the amount of phonological detail associated with toddlers’ lexical representations of words and their sensitivity to mispronunciations of these words, research has only recently begun to address the mechanisms guiding the use of this detail during word recognition. The current chapter reviews the literature on experiments using the visual world paradigm to assess infant word recognition, in particular, the amount of attention infants pay to phonological detail in word recognition. We further present data from a novel study using a visual priming paradigm to assess the extent to which toddlers retrieve sub-phonemic detail during lexical access. The results suggest that both the retrieval of an object’s label and toddlers’ recognition of a word involve activation of not only phonemic but also sub-segmental information associated with the lexical representation of this word. We therefore conclude that lexical access in toddlers is mediated by sub-phonemic information.

We examined 7.5‐month‐old infants' ability to segment words from infant‐ and adult‐directed speech (IDS and ADS). In particular, we extended the standard design of most segmentation studies by including a phase where infants were repeatedly exposed to target word recordings at their own home (extended exposure) in addition to a laboratory‐based familiarization. This enabled us to examine infants' segmentation of words from speech input in their naturalistic environment, extending current findings to learning outside the laboratory. Results of a modified preferential‐listening task show that infants listened longer to isolated tokens of familiarized words from home relative to novel control words regardless of register. However, infants showed no recognition of words exposed to during purely laboratory‐based familiarization. This indicates that infants succeed in retaining words in long‐term memory following extended exposure and recognizing them later on with considerable flexibility. In addition, infants segmented words from both IDS and ADS, suggesting limited effects of speech register on learning from extended exposure in naturalistic environments. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between segmentation success and infants' attention to ADS, but not to IDS, during the extended exposure phase. This finding speaks to current language acquisition models assuming that infants' individual attention to language stimuli drives successful learning.

One of the first challenges facing the young language learner is the task of segmenting words from a natural language speech stream, without prior knowledge of how these words sound. Studies with younger children find that children find it easier to segment words from fluent speech when the words are presented in infant-directed speech, i.e., the kind of speech typically directed toward infants, compared to adult-directed speech. The current study examines whether infants continue to display similar differences in their segmentation of infant- and adult-directed speech later in development. We show that 16-month-old infants successfully segment words from a natural language speech stream presented in the adult-directed register and recognize these words later when presented in isolation. Furthermore, there were no differences in infants’ ability to segment words from infant- and adult-directed speech at this age, although infants’ success at segmenting words from adult-directed speech correlated with their vocabulary size.

The anticipation of the forthcoming behaviour of social interaction partners is a useful ability supporting interaction and communication between social partners. Associations and prediction based on the production system (in line with views that listeners use the production system covertly to anticipate what the other person might be likely to say) are two potential factors, which have been proposed to be involved in anticipatory language processing. We examined the influence of both factors on the degree to which listeners predict upcoming linguistic input. Are listeners more likely to predictbookas an appropriate continuation of the sentence “The boy reads a”, based on the strength of the association between the wordsreadandbook(strong association) andreadandletter(weak association)? Do more proficient producers predict more? What is the interplay of these two influences on prediction? The results suggest that associations influence language-mediated anticipatory eye gaze in two-year-olds and adults only when two thematically appropriate target objects compete for overt attention but not when these objects are presented separately. Furthermore, children's prediction abilities are strongly related to their language production skills when appropriate target objects are presented separately but not when presented together. Both influences on prediction in language processing thus appear to be context dependent. We conclude that multiple factors simultaneously influence listeners’ anticipation of upcoming linguistic input and that only such a dynamic approach to prediction can capture listeners’ prowess at predictive language processing.

Examined whether phonological stress impacts orthographic misspelling processing during silent reading. 20 native German speakers (mean age 23 years) performed a lexical-decision task while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Subjects read sequences of trochaic or iambic disyllabic words with orthographic misspellings introduced by changing the onset consonant of the first or second syllable. Results present strong support for the activation of word stress in silent reading and its influence on the processing of misspellings as reflected in the selective modulation of the N400-like component and the P600 by misspellings in stressed syllables. This was particularly the case when misspelling occurred in the middle of the word, whereas effects of stress were eliminated when misspellings occurred in the more salient word-initial position.

Examined whether the processing of individual words in silent reading is impacted by rhythmic properties of the surrounding context. Listeners are sensitive to the metric structure of words, i.e., an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, in auditory speech processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as 19 participants (mean age 24 years) listened to a sequence of words with a consistent metrical pattern, e.g., a series of trochaic words, suggest that participants register words metrically incongruent with the preceding sequence. Participants' EEG data were recorded as they read lists of either three trochaic or iambic disyllabic words followed by a target word that was either congruent or incongruent with the preceding metric pattern. Results showed that ERPs to targets were modulated by an interaction between metrical structure (iambic vs trochaic) and congruence: for iambs, more positive ERPs were observed in the incongruent than congruent condition 250-400 ms and 400-600 ms poststimulus, whereas no reliable impact of congruence was found for trochees. It is suggested that when iambs are in an incongruent context, i.e., preceded by trochees, the context contains the metrical structure that is more typical in participants' native language which facilitates processing relative to when they are presented in a congruent context, containing the less typical, i.e., iambic, metrical structure. The results provide evidence that comprehenders are sensitive to the prosodic properties of the context even in silent reading, such that this sensitivity impacts lexicosemantic processing of individual words.

Presents a critical review of arguments in favor of and against the view that prediction is necessary for understanding language. First, potential arguments in favor of the view that prediction provides a unified theoretical principle of the human mind and that it pervades cortical function are reviewed. It is discussed whether evidence of human abilities to detect statistical regularities is necessarily evidence for predictive processing, and suggestions that prediction is necessary for language learning are evaluated. Next, arguments in support of the contrasting viewpoint are reviewed: that prediction lends a ``helping hand'', but is not strictly needed for language processing. It is pointed out that not all language users appear to predict language and that suboptimal input makes prediction often very challenging. Prediction, moreover, is argued to be strongly context-dependent and impeded by resource limitations. Furthermore, it is argued that it may be problematic that most experimental evidence for predictive language processing comes from prediction-encouraging experimental set-ups. It is concluded that languages can be learned and understood in the absence of prediction. Claims that all language processing is predictive in nature are considered to be premature.

This editorial provides an overview of the Special issue of Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. This Special Issue discusses interrelations between non-linguistic and linguistic representations of cognition and action in development. The special issue is devoted to current empirical evidence from different areas of developmental research. The key question is whether and how non-linguistic and linguistic modes of representation and perception are linked and interrelated during the course of development. This key question was addressed by the different contributions with respect to different areas of development and using a variety of different approaches. The contributions primarily focused on infancy and early childhood, spanning from 9 months to 4 years. This period of life is of particular relevance with respect to language development because children start to produce their first words around their first birthday and their language acquisition undergoes rapid development during the next few years.

Bilingual children, like bilingual adults, co-activate both languages during word recognition and production. But what is the extent of this co-activation? In the present study, we asked whether or not bilingual preschool children activate a shared phonological cohort across languages when hearing words only in their L1. We tested German-English children on a cross-modal priming paradigm. To ensure co-activation of languages, children first heard a short code-switch story. Compared to a monolingual control group, bilingual children in Experiment 1 showed only partial sensitivity to the L1 cohort. Bilingual children who did not hear the code-switch story (Experiment 2) showed priming effects identical to the monolinguals in Experiment 1. Results indicate that under single-language contexts, German-English bilingual preschoolers do not activate the non-target language cohort during word recognition but instead restrict cohort activation to the language of input. In contrast, presentation of the non-target language in the code-switch story appears to shift cohort activation and increase L2 activation, suggesting a highly flexible language system that is in tune to the broader linguistic context. We consider mechanisms of bilingual language control that may enable bilingual toddlers to limit cross-language phonological activation.

We examined the contents of language-mediated prediction in toddlers by investigating the extent to which toddlers are sensitive to visual shape representations of upcoming words. Previous studies with adults suggest limits to the degree to which information about the visual form of a referent is predicted during language comprehension in low constraint sentences. Toddlers (30-month-olds) heard either contextually constraining sentences or contextually neutral sentences as they viewed images that were either identical or shape-related to the heard target label. We observed that toddlers activate shape information of upcoming linguistic input in contextually constraining semantic contexts; hearing a sentence context that was predictive of the target word activated perceptual information that subsequently influenced visual attention toward shape-related targets. Our findings suggest that visual shape is central to predictive language processing in toddlers.

Recent studies suggest that infants’ audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants’ emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds on their ability to detect mismatches between concurrently presented auditory and visual vowels and related their performance to their productive abilities and later vocabulary size. Results show that infants’ ability to detect mismatches between auditory and visually presented vowels differs depending on the vowels involved. Furthermore, infants’ sensitivity to mismatches is modulated by their current articulatory knowledge and correlates with their vocabulary size at 12 months of age. This suggests that—aside from infants’ ability to match nonnative audiovisual cues (Pons et al., 2009)—their ability to match native auditory and visual cues continues to develop during the first year of life. Our findings point to a potential role of salient vowel cues and productive abilities in the development of audiovisual speech perception, and further indicate a relation between infants’ early sensitivity to audiovisual speech cues and their later language development.

Early Word Learning explores the overlapping and interactive processes leading to young children learning words and their meanings. Experts in the field review the development of early lexical acquisition, starting with an infant's learning of native speech sounds, to segmenting proto-words from fluent speech, mapping individual words to meanings in the face of natural variability and uncertainty, and developing a structured mental lexicon. Drawing on cutting-edge research in infant eye-tracking, neuroimaging techniques and computational modelling, this book surveys the field covering both established results and the most recent advances in word learning research. The chapters combine empirical, computational and theoretical perspectives, to provide a comprehensive yet coherent and unified representation of early word learning, spanning the first two years of life. It is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in early language development and developmental psycholinguistics as well as researchers in these fields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

While American English infants typically segment words from fluent speech by 7.5-months, studies of infants from other language backgrounds have difficulty replicating this finding. One possible explanation for this cross-linguistic difference is that the input infants from different language backgrounds receive is not as infant-directed as American English infant-directed speech (Floccia et al., 2016). Against this background, the current study investigates whether German 7.5- and 9-month-old infants segment words from fluent speech when the input is prosodically similar to American English IDS. While 9-month-olds showed successful segmentation of words from exaggerated IDS, 7.5-month-olds did not. These findings highlight (a) the beneficial impact of exaggerated IDS on infant speech segmentation, (b) cross-linguistic differences in word segmentation that are based not just on the kind of input available to children and suggest (c) developmental differences in the role of IDS as an attentional spotlight in speech segmentation.

The adult lexicon is organized among many representational dimensions that encode phonological, semantic and perceptual links among words. Priming studies that use behavioral, eye-tracking and electrophysiological measurements highlight the interactive and dynamic nature of lexical processing and representation in the adult lexicon. These studies suggest that word recognition routinely involves simultaneous access to other words that overlap with a spoken word on phonological, semantic or other perceptual dimensions. While these studies provide valuable information about the mechanisms guiding lexical retrieval and the factors underlying lexical organization in the lexicons of adult college-educated individuals who know many thousands of words, it is debatable the extent to which these findings can be extended to our understanding of early lexical processing in young children. On the one hand, differences in general cognitive abilities, linguistic experience and language-related knowledge in young children and college-educated adults could imply drastic differences in the way words are linked in developing and mature lexicons. On the other hand, once a word has an entry in the mental lexicon, how many or which other words the child knows may be irrelevant, such that a) the structure of the developing lexicon is a miniature version of the adult lexicon, organized according to similar dimensions; and b) the processes guiding word recognition differ minimally across development. Adjudicating between these two proposals requires examination of the structure of the early lexicon and the processes guiding lexical processing in young children. How does this structure initially develop and change as the child’s knowledge grows over time? Does the organization of the early lexicon influence subsequent word learning and word processing? Understanding these questions has the potential to inform adult theories of psycholinguistic processing and highlight important processes in early vocabulary development. This chapter will attempt to answer these questions against the background of the literature to date whilst also sketching paths for future research on the topic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Although bilinguals respond differently to emotionally valenced words in their first language (L1) relative to emotionally neutral words, similar effects of emotional valence are hard to come by in second language (L2) processing. We examine the extent to which these differences in first and second language processing are due to the context in which the 2 languages are acquired: L1 is typically acquired in more naturalistic settings (e.g., family) than L2 (e.g., at school). Fifty German–English bilinguals learned unfamiliar German and English negative and neutral words in 2 different learning conditions: One group (emotion video context) watched videos of a person providing definitions of the words with facial and gestural cues, whereas another group (neutral video context) received the same definitions without gestural and emotional cues. Subsequently, participants carried out an emotional Stroop task, a sentence completion task, and a recall task on the words they had just learned. We found that the effect of learning context on the influence of emotional valence on responding was modulated by a) language status, L1 versus L2, and b) task requirement. We suggest that a more nuanced approach is required to capture the differences in emotion effects in the speed versus accuracy of access to words across different learning contexts and different languages, in particular with regard to our finding that bilinguals respond to L2 words in a similar manner as L1 words provided that the learning context is naturalistic and incorporates emotional and prosodic cues.

Sign languages use the horizontal plane to refer to discourse referents introduced at referential locations. However, the question remains whether the assignment of discourse referents follows a particular default pattern as recently proposed such that two new discourse referents are respectively assigned to the right (ipsilateral) and left (contralateral) side of (right handed) signers. The present event-related potential study on German Sign Language investigates the hypothesis that signers assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents even in the absence of overt localization. By using a semantic mismatch-design, we constructed sentence sets where the second sentence was either consistent or inconsistent with the used pronoun. Semantic mismatch conditions evoked an N400, whereas a contralateral  index  sign engendered a Phonological Mismatch Negativity. The current study provides supporting evidence that signers are sensitive to the mismatch and make use of a default pattern to assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents.

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are among the most widely used evaluation tools for early language development. CDIs are filled in by the parents or caregivers of young children by indicating which of a prespecified list of words and/or sentences their child understands and/or produces. Despite the success of these instruments, their administration is time-consuming and can be of limited use in clinical settings, multilingual environments, or when parents possess low literacy skills. We present a new method through which an estimation of the full-CDI score can be obtained, by combining parental responses on a limited set of words sampled randomly from the full CDI with vocabulary information extracted from the WordBank database, sampled from age-, gender-, and language-matched participants. Real-data simulations using versions of the CDI-WS for American English, German, and Norwegian as examples revealed the high validity and reliability of the instrument, even for tests having just 25 words, effectively cutting administration time to a couple of minutes. Empirical validations with new German-speaking participants confirmed the robustness of the test.