Spoken verb learning in children with language disorder.

The current study examined spoken verb learning in elementary school children with language disorder (LD). We aimed to replicate verb learning deficits reported in younger children with LD and to examine whether verb instrumentality, a semantic factor reflecting whether an action requires an instrument (e.g., "to chop" is an instrumental verb), influenced verb learning. The possible facilitating effect of orthographic cues presented during training was also evaluated. In an exploratory analysis, we investigated whether language and reading skills mediated verb learning performance. General language skills and verb learning were assessed in Dutch children with LD and age-matched typically developing controls (n = 25 per group) aged 8 to 12 years (M = 9;9 [years;months], SD = 1;3). Using video animations, children learned 20 nonwords depicting actions comprising 10 instrumental and 10 noninstrumental verbs. Half of the items were trained with orthographic information present. Verb learning was assessed using an animation-word matching and animation naming task. Linear mixed-effects models showed a main effect of group for all verb learning measures, demonstrating that children with LD learned fewer words and at a slower rate than the control group. No effect of verb instrumentality, presence of orthographic information, or the included mediators was found. Our results emphasize the importance of continued vocabulary instruction in elementary school to strengthen verb encoding. Given that our findings are inconsistent with the overall literature showing an orthographic facilitation effect, future studies should investigate whether participants pay attention to the written word form in learning contexts with moving stimuli.

The effect of aided language stimulation on the acquisition of receptive vocabulary in children with complex communication needs and severe intellectual disability: a comparison of two dosages.

Aided language stimulation is an augmented input strategy that facilitates the expressive and receptive language skills of persons who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The aim of this study was to determine and compare the acquisition of receptive vocabulary items during implementation of aided language stimulation with dosages of 40% and 70%, respectively. An adapted alternating treatment design was replicated across six participants with complex communication needs and severe intellectual disability. All participants demonstrated receptive vocabulary acquisition when aided language stimulation was provided with a dosage of 70%, and two participants demonstrated acquisition when a dosage of 40% was provided. Receptive vocabulary acquisition was maintained following a 6-day withdrawal period. The dosage of augmented input may impact receptive vocabulary acquisition for children with complex communication needs and severe intellectual disability, with higher dosages being more effective for some participants. The findings indicate that clinicians should be aware that dosage is an important consideration when providing aided language stimulation to facilitate receptive vocabulary acquisition in children with complex communication needs and severe intellectual disability.

A triangulation method on the effectiveness of digital game-based language learning for vocabulary acquisition.

This research aimed to explore the views of 8th grade students on digital game-based English language learning as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 69 students between the ages of 12 and 14 participated in the study. Students' vocabulary acquisition skills were tested using a web 2.0 application called "Quizziz." The study utilized a triangulation method in which the results of a quasi-experiment and the metaphorical perceptions of the learners were obtained. The results of the tests were recorded at two-week intervals, and students' reactions to the results were collected using a data collection tool. The study used a pre-test, post-test, and control group design. The experimental and control groups took a pre-test before the study began. The experimental group then practiced vocabulary using Quizziz, while the control group practiced vocabulary by memorizing it in their mother tongue. The post-test results showed significant differences between the control and experimental groups. In addition, content analysis was used to analyse the data, with metaphors being grouped and frequencies calculated. The students generally expressed positive views on digital game-based EFL, stating that it was highly successful and that in-game power-ups, competing with other students, and receiving rapid feedback improved their motivation.

Sleep-learning impairs subsequent awake-learning.

Although we can learn new information while asleep, we usually cannot consciously remember the sleep-formed memories - presumably because learning occurred in an unconscious state. Here, we ask whether sleep-learning expedites the subsequent awake-learning of the same information. To answer this question, we reanalyzed data (Züst et al., 2019, Curr Biol) from napping participants, who learned new semantic associations between pseudowords and translation-words (guga-ship) while in slow-wave sleep. They retrieved sleep-formed associations unconsciously on an implicit memory test following awakening. Then, participants took five runs of paired-associative learning to probe carry-over effects of sleep-learning on awake-learning. Surprisingly, sleep-learning diminished awake-learning when participants learned semantic associations that were congruent to sleep-learned associations (guga-boat). Yet, learning associations that conflicted with sleep-learned associations (guga-coin) was unimpaired relative to learning new associations (resun-table; baseline). We speculate that the impeded wake-learning originated in a deficient synaptic downscaling and resulting synaptic saturation in neurons that were activated during both sleep-learning and awake-learning.

The interplay between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms during the time-course of verbal associative learning: An event-related potential study.

Humans continuously learn new information. Here, we examined the temporal brain dynamics of explicit verbal associative learning between unfamiliar items. In the first experiment, 25 adults learned object-pseudoword associations during a 5-day training program allowing us to track the N400 dynamics across learning blocks within and across days. Successful learning was accompanied by an initial frontal N400 that decreased in amplitude across blocks during the first day and shifted to parietal sites during the last training day. In Experiment 2, we replicated our findings with 38 new participants randomly assigned to a consistent learning or an inconsistent learning group. The N400 amplitude modulations that we found, both within and between learning sessions, are taken to reflect the emergence of novel lexical traces even when learning concerns items for which no semantic information is provided. The shift in N400 topography suggests that different N400 neural generators may contribute to specific word learning steps through a balance between domain-general and language-specific mechanisms.

Second Language Vocabulary Gains from Listening Versus Reading Comprehension Input: A Comparative Study.

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of vocabulary recognition and vocabulary production in the short-and- long-term via listening and reading comprehension activities using ®Voice software. Sixty participants were invited to read or listen to two passages in different sessions, that is, three sessions in listening inputs and one session in reading comprehension. The materials in reading comprehension input were converted into audio and given for the students who were assigned to participate in the listening sessions. Vocabulary recognition was measured through written multiple-choice tests, whereas the vocabulary production was assessed by a cloze test for both scenarios. Each test was administered before the intervention immediately after the intervention and at a delayed post of time for both inputs. Results showed that the students were able to learn new vocabulary from both modes in the pre-post-delayed treatments. Participants scored higher in recognition vocabulary test than in the production test. In view of the vocabulary gains in both scenarios in the post-tests, the performance of listeners was significantly lower than that of readers after the first session, which was almost the same after the second session, and significantly higher after the third listening session. However, vocabulary acquisition from listening comprehension mode was significantly higher than that from reading input in the delayed post-tests.

Two-year-old children's processing of two-word sequences occurring 19 or more times per million and their influence on subsequent word learning.

We know that 8-month-old infants track the statistical properties of a series of syllables and that 2- and 3-year-old children process familiar phrases more efficiently than unfamiliar phrases, but less is known about the intermediary level of two-word sequences. In Study 1, 2-year-olds (N = 45, mean age = 651 days) heard two-word sequences consisting of a prime word followed by a noun, with two pictures appearing on the screen (depicting the noun and a distractor). Eye tracking showed that children looked more quickly at the noun picture for two-word sequences occurring an average of 19 times per million and 206 times per million in child-directed speech than for novel sequences. In Study 2, corpus analyses showed that 2-year-olds' noun learning increased in line with the frequency of the two-word sequence that preceded it in caregiver speech utterances. This effect holds even after controlling nouns for frequency in caregiver speech, phonemic length, neighborhood density, phonotactic probability, and concreteness and after removing nouns produced in isolation by caregivers and nouns produced by children before being produced by caregivers. These studies show that young children's language processing is facilitated by known two-word sequences, allowing children to focus on more novel aspects of the utterance. Such efficiencies are far-reaching because nearly two thirds of child-directed utterances contain two-word sequences with frequencies of 19 or more per million.

Effects of repeated retrieval on keyword mediator use: shifting to direct retrieval predicts better learning outcomes.

Keyword mediators are an effective memory technique to encode novel vocabulary: learners link a novel word form to its meaning with a mental image that includes a keyword that resembles the word form (e.g., nyanya = tomato; keyword mnemonic: the ninja chops the tomato in half). Prior research suggests that such mediated form-meaning associations become less dependent on keywords after retrieval practice. The present study investigated if retrieval-induced decreases in mediator use predict word retention. Thirty participants learned novel vocabulary using experimenter-provided keywords and repeatedly retrieved the words from memory while thinking aloud. As expected, keyword use decreased with practice: learners stopped mentioning keywords for 21.6% of the words (on average after 8.27 retrievals). Shifting to direct, unmediated retrieval predicted higher form and meaning recall on a retention test after 6-8 days. Continuing retrieval practice until a shift has occurred to direct retrieval thus seems beneficial for retention.

Language activities in a minority-majority language context: book-reading at home is more important for Frisian than for Dutch.

Previous research has shown that in a minority-majority language context, the quantity of language input at home is more important for the development of the minority language than for the development of the majority language. In the current study, we examined whether the same holds true for the frequency of specific language activities at home. In a group of five- and six-year-old Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (n = 120), we investigated to what extent vocabulary and morphology knowledge were predicted by reading activities, watching TV, and story-telling activities in both languages. The results showed that reading in Frisian predicted both Frisian vocabulary and morphology, while reading in Dutch only predicted Dutch vocabulary. This shows that reading at home is most important for the development of the minority language. This especially holds true for the acquisition of Frisian morphology, a domain that is known to be vulnerable in language acquisition.

The ASL-CDI 2.0: An updated, normed adaptation of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language.

Vocabulary is a critical early marker of language development. The MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory has been adapted to dozens of languages, and provides a bird's-eye view of children's early vocabularies which can be informative for both research and clinical purposes. We present an update to the American Sign Language Communicative Development Inventory (the ASL-CDI 2.0,  https://www.aslcdi.org ), a normed assessment of early ASL vocabulary that can be widely administered online by individuals with no formal training in sign language linguistics. The ASL-CDI 2.0 includes receptive and expressive vocabulary, and a Gestures and Phrases section; it also introduces an online interface that presents ASL signs as videos. We validated the ASL-CDI 2.0 with expressive and receptive in-person tasks administered to a subset of participants. The norming sample presented here consists of 120 deaf children (ages 9 to 73 months) with deaf parents. We present an analysis of the measurement properties of the ASL-CDI 2.0. Vocabulary increases with age, as expected. We see an early noun bias that shifts with age, and a lag between receptive and expressive vocabulary. We present these findings with indications for how the ASL-CDI 2.0 may be used in a range of clinical and research settings.

Effects of Language Skills and Strategy Use on Vocabulary Learning Through Lexical Translation and Inferencing.

This study explores how vocabulary learning strategy usage and skills in the four language domains relate to participants' increase in vocabulary size and to the learning of specific vocabulary items over a certain period of time. Sixty-one advanced L1 Arabic L2 learners of English read target words in semi-authentic reading materials and were instructed to either guess the meaning from context or consult a dictionary. Pre- and delayed post-tests assessed vocabulary size and knowledge of the target vocabulary items. Results showed that learning through inferencing, but not learning through dictionary use, depended on learners' familiarity with the particular learning strategy. Additionally, note taking and reading comprehension influenced lexical knowledge and acquisition in complex ways.

The Use of a Reading Lexicon to Aid Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition by EFL Arab Learners.

This article investigates how the use of a deliberate approach of analyzing a given reading may predict differences in CVA effectiveness. Sixty Arab EFL learners were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group, thirty participants for each. The experimental group received training in the deliberate Clarke and Nation (System 8:211-220, 1980) CVA technique, whereas the control group were not guided through a training method. Then, both groups were asked to answer three vocabulary tests and then participate to finish a series of six readings adjusted using Nation's K-level reading lexicon to control the difficult words during readings. After treatments, the students took a post-test vocabulary session. Results show that the group that have used the deliberate CVA technique retained about twice as many new words as the other group did. That is the use of a deliberate-CVA methodology significantly improves learning. The experimental manipulation produced a learning effect that was 76.1% greater than that of the control group in terms of word context recognition and 128.0% greater than that of the control group in terms of word definition accuracy. Pedagogical implications, limitations and directions for further research are discussed.

Listening while reading promotes word learning from stories.

Reading and listening to stories fosters vocabulary development. Studies of single word learning suggest that new words are more likely to be learned when both their oral and written forms are provided, compared with when only one form is given. This study explored children's learning of phonological, orthographic, and semantic information about words encountered in a story context. A total of 71 children (8- and 9-year-olds) were exposed to a story containing novel words in one of three conditions: (a) listening, (b) reading, or (c) simultaneous listening and reading ("combined" condition). Half of the novel words were presented with a definition, and half were presented without a definition. Both phonological and orthographic learning were assessed through recognition tasks. Semantic learning was measured using three tasks assessing recognition of each word's category, subcategory, and definition. Phonological learning was observed in all conditions, showing that phonological recoding supported the acquisition of phonological forms when children were not exposed to phonology (the reading condition). In contrast, children showed orthographic learning of the novel words only when they were exposed to orthographic forms, indicating that exposure to phonological forms alone did not prompt the establishment of orthographic representations. Semantic learning was greater in the combined condition than in the listening and reading conditions. The presence of the definition was associated with better performance on the semantic subcategory and definition posttests but not on the phonological, orthographic, or category posttests. Findings are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and the availability of attentional resources.

Symbolic flexibility during unsupervised word learning in children and adults.

Considerable debate in language acquisition concerns whether word learning is driven by domain-general (symbolically flexible) or domain-specific learning mechanisms. Prior work has shown that very young children can map objects to either words or nonlinguistic sounds, but by 20 months of age this ability narrows to only words. This suggests that although symbolically flexible mechanisms are operative early, they become more specified over development. However, such research has been conducted only with young children in ostensive teaching contexts. Thus, we investigated symbolic flexibility at later ages in more referentially ambiguous learning situations. In Experiment 1, 47 6- to 8-year-olds acquired eight symbol-object mappings in a cross-situational word learning paradigm where multiple mappings are learned based only on co-occurrence. In the word condition participants learned with novel pseudowords, whereas in the sound condition participants learned with nonlinguistic sounds (e.g., beeps). Children acquired the mappings, but performance did not differ across conditions, suggesting broad symbolic flexibility. In Experiment 2, 41 adults learned 16 mappings in a comparable design. They learned with ease in both conditions but showed a significant advantage for words. Thus, symbolic flexibility decreases with age, potentially due to repeated experiences with linguistic materials. Moreover, trial-by-trial analyses of the microstructure of both children's and adults' performance did not reveal any substantial differences due to condition, consistent with the hypothesis that learning mechanisms are generally employed similarly with both words and nonlinguistic sounds.

The Road to Language Learning Is Not Entirely Iconic: Iconicity, Neighborhood Density, and Frequency Facilitate Acquisition of Sign Language.

Iconic mappings between words and their meanings are far more prevalent than once estimated and seem to support children's acquisition of new words, spoken or signed. We asked whether iconicity's prevalence in sign language overshadows two other factors known to support the acquisition of spoken vocabulary: neighborhood density (the number of lexical items phonologically similar to the target) and lexical frequency. Using mixed-effects logistic regressions, we reanalyzed 58 parental reports of native-signing deaf children's productive acquisition of 332 signs in American Sign Language (ASL; Anderson & Reilly, 2002) and found that iconicity, neighborhood density, and lexical frequency independently facilitated vocabulary acquisition. Despite differences in iconicity and phonological structure between signed and spoken language, signing children, like children learning a spoken language, track statistical information about lexical items and their phonological properties and leverage this information to expand their vocabulary.

Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: Using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth.

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children's data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before.

Do children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders benefit from the presence of orthography when learning new spoken words?

This experiment investigated whether children with specific language impairment (SLI), children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and typically developing children benefit from the incidental presence of orthography when learning new oral vocabulary items. Children with SLI, children with ASD, and typically developing children (n=27 per group) between 8 and 13 years of age were matched in triplets for age and nonverbal reasoning. Participants were taught 12 mappings between novel phonological strings and referents; half of these mappings were trained with orthography present and half were trained with orthography absent. Groups did not differ on the ability to learn new oral vocabulary, although there was some indication that children with ASD were slower than controls to identify newly learned items. During training, the ASD, SLI, and typically developing groups benefited from orthography to the same extent. In supplementary analyses, children with SLI were matched in pairs to an additional control group of younger typically developing children for nonword reading. Compared with younger controls, children with SLI showed equivalent oral vocabulary acquisition and benefit from orthography during training. Our findings are consistent with current theoretical accounts of how lexical entries are acquired and replicate previous studies that have shown orthographic facilitation for vocabulary acquisition in typically developing children and children with ASD. We demonstrate this effect in SLI for the first time. The study provides evidence that the presence of orthographic cues can support oral vocabulary acquisition, motivating intervention approaches (as well as standard classroom teaching) that emphasize the orthographic form.

Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children.

Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of cross-situational statistical word learning in children's early vocabulary development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children's cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address the mechanisms underlying children's learning by demonstrating that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational word learning at different points in development are discussed along with the methodological implications of employing school-aged children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting early word learning.

Language Distance Moderates the Effect of a Mixed-Language Environment on New-Word Learning for 4-Year-Old Children.

As bilingual families increase, the phenomenon of language mixing among children in mixed-language environments has gradually attracted academic attention. This study aims to explore the impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and whether language distance moderates this impact. We recruited two groups of bilingual children, Chinese-English bilinguals and Chinese-Japanese bilinguals, to learn two first-language new words in a monolingual environment and a mixed-language environment, respectively. The results showed that the participants could successfully recognize the novel words in the code-switching sentences. However, when we compared the performance of the two groups of bilingual children, we found that the gaze time proportion of the Chinese-English bilingual children under the code-switching condition was significantly higher than that of the Chinese-Japanese bilingual children, while there was no significant difference under the monolingual condition. This suggests that language mixing has an inhibitory effect on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and that this inhibitory effect is influenced by language distance, that is, the greater the language distance, the stronger the inhibitory effect. This study reveals the negative impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and also implies that there may be some other influencing factors, so more research is needed on different types of bilingual children.

Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child-but not toddler-ASL vocabulary size.

Most deaf children have hearing parents who do not know a sign language at birth, and are at risk of limited language input during early childhood. Studying these children as they learn a sign language has revealed that timing of first-language exposure critically shapes language outcomes. But the input deaf children receive in their first language is not only delayed, it is much more variable than most first language learners, as many learn their first language from parents who are themselves new sign language learners. Much of the research on deaf children learning a sign language has considered the role of parent input using broad strokes, categorizing hearing parents as non-native, poor signers, and deaf parents as native, strong signers. In this study, we deconstruct these categories, and examine how variation in sign language skills among hearing parents might affect children's vocabulary acquisition. This study included 44 deaf children between 8- and 60-months-old who were learning ASL and had hearing parents who were also learning ASL. We observed an interactive effect of parent ASL proficiency and age, such that parent ASL proficiency was a significant predictor of child ASL vocabulary size, but not among the infants and toddlers. The proficiency of language models can affect acquisition above and beyond age of acquisition, particularly as children grow. At the same time, the most skilled parents in this sample were not as fluent as "native" deaf signers, and yet their children reliably had age-expected ASL vocabularies. Data and reproducible analyses are available at https://osf.io/9ya6h/.