Noun and Verb Lexicons Differentially Predict Later Grammatical Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children With and Without Late Language Emergence.

PURPOSE: The current investigation evaluated the extent to which early noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes predicted later grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with and without late language emergence (LLE) using a parent report. METHOD: In Study 1, the parents of 24 Mandarin-speaking children with typical language filled out the toddler version of Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventory-Taiwan (MCDI-T) when these children were 24 and 36 months old. In Study 2, the parents of 23 children with LLE completed the same form when these children were 24, 36, and 48 months old. Noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from the MCDI-T form for each child. RESULTS: Study 1 showed that verb lexicon size, but not noun or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with typical language. Study 2 revealed that noun lexicon size, but not verb or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with LLE. Noun lexicon size at 36 months was also the only significant predictor for grammatical complexity scores at 48 months in children with LLE. CONCLUSIONS: Noun and verb lexicon size differentially predicted later grammatical outcomes in young Mandarin-speaking children with and without LLE. The finding suggested that children with LLE may have approached grammatical learning differently from their typical peers due to the small verb lexicon size in the early phase of language development.

Characteristics of Early Expressive Vocabulary in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to evaluate whether Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrated early lexical composition similar to their hearing peers who were at the same vocabulary level and the extent to which children with CIs were sensitive to linguistic and conceptual properties when developing early lexicon. METHOD: Participants were 77 Mandarin-speaking children with CIs who received CIs before 30 months of age. Their expressive vocabulary was documented using the Infant Checklist of the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese 9 or 12 months after CI activation. Percent social words, common nouns, predicates (verbs, adjectives), and closed-class words in total vocabulary were computed for children at different vocabulary levels. Common nouns and verbs were further coded for their word class (noun, verb), word frequency, word length, and imageability to predict how likely a given noun or verb would be produced by children with CIs. RESULTS: Like children with typical hearing, social words were the most dominant category when vocabulary size in children with CIs was smaller than 20 words; common nouns became the most dominant category when the vocabulary size reached 21 words. The difference in percent common nouns and percent predicates (i.e., noun bias) was similar in children with CIs and their hearing peers. In addition, verbs, common words, monosyllabic words, and more imageable words were more likely to be produced by children with CIs than their counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Mandarin children with CIs showed language-specific patterns in early lexical composition like their hearing peers. They were able to use multiple linguistic and conceptual cues when approaching early expressive vocabulary despite perceptual and processing constraints. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21357723.

A mechanistic approach to cross-domain perceptual narrowing in the first year of life.

Language and face processing develop in similar ways during the first year of life. Early in the first year of life, infants demonstrate broad abilities for discriminating among faces and speech. These discrimination abilities then become tuned to frequently experienced groups of people or languages. This process of perceptual development occurs between approximately 6 and 12 months of age and is largely shaped by experience. However, the mechanisms underlying perceptual development during this time, and whether they are shared across domains, remain largely unknown. Here, we highlight research findings across domains and propose a top-down/bottom-up processing approach as a guide for future research. It is hypothesized that perceptual narrowing and tuning in development is the result of a shift from primarily bottom-up processing to a combination of bottom-up and top-down influences. In addition, we propose word learning as an important top-down factor that shapes tuning in both the speech and face domains, leading to similar observed developmental trajectories across modalities. Importantly, we suggest that perceptual narrowing/tuning is the result of multiple interacting factors and not explained by the development of a single mechanism.

Children with ASD can use gaze in support of word recognition and learning.

BACKGROUND: Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle to understand familiar words and learn unfamiliar words. We explored the extent to which these problems reflect deficient use of probabilistic gaze in the extra-linguistic context. METHOD: Thirty children with ASD and 43 with typical development (TD) participated in a spoken word recognition and mapping task. They viewed photographs of a woman behind three objects and simultaneously heard a word. For word recognition, the objects and words were familiar and the woman gazed ahead (neutral), toward the named object (facilitative), or toward an un-named object (contradictory). For word mapping, the objects and words were unfamiliar and only the neutral and facilitative conditions were employed. The children clicked on the named object, registering accuracy and reaction time. RESULTS: Speed of word recognition did not differ between groups but varied with gaze such that responses were fastest in the facilitative condition and slowest in the contradictory condition. Only the ASD group responded slower to low frequency than high-frequency words. Accuracy of word mapping did not differ between groups, but accuracy varied with gaze with higher performance in the facilitative than neutral condition. Both groups scored above single-trial chance levels in the neutral condition by tracking cross-situational information. Only in the ASD group did mapping vary with receptive vocabulary. CONCLUSIONS: Under laboratory conditions, children with ASD can monitor gaze and judge its reliability as a cue to word meaning as well as typical peers. The use of cross-situational statistics to support word learning may be problematic for those who have weak language abilities.

Miranda rights comprehension in young adults with specific language impairment.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to determine whether citizens with language impairment understand legal rights as conveyed in Miranda warnings. METHOD: Grisso's Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights (1998) was administered to 34 young adults, half of whom met the diagnostic criteria for specific language impairment (SLI). A correlational analysis of the relationship between language scores and Miranda rights comprehension was conducted, as were tests of differences between individuals with SLI (n = 17) and individuals without SLI. RESULTS: Language ability was positively correlated with overall performance on the Miranda measure. As a group, individuals with SLI were significantly poorer than their peers with normal language at defining Miranda vocabulary and applying Miranda rights in hypothetical situations. The group with SLI was also marginally less able to paraphrase Miranda sentences. CONCLUSION: Language impairment limits comprehension of Miranda warnings. As a result, citizens with language impairment are at risk of being denied their constitutional rights.

What compound words mean to children with specific language impairment.

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun-noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the children described the meaning of conventional noun-noun compounds. The SLI and AM groups did not differ in parsing the nouns, but the SLI group was poorer at explaining the semantic relationships between them. Compared to vocabulary mates, a larger proportion of the SLI group successfully parsed the compounds but a smaller proportion could explain them. These difficulties may reflect problems in the development of links within the semantic lexicon.

Finding the signal by adding noise: The role of noncontrastive phonetic variability in early word learning.

It is well attested that 14-month olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g. bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. In contrast, Rost and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14-month olds' minimal pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study investigates which components of the variability found in multi-talker input improved infants' processing, assessing both the phonologically contrastive aspects of the speech stream and phonologically irrelevant indexical and suprasegmental aspects. In the first two experiments, speaker was held constant while cues to word-initial voicing were systematically manipulated. Infants failed in both cases. The third experiment introduced variability in speaker, but voicing cues were invariant within each category. Infants in this condition learned the words. We conclude that aspects of the speech signal that have been typically thought of as noise are in fact valuable information - signal - for the young word learner.

Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning.

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still-developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them.