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New Words (new + word)
Selected AbstractsReorganizing the Lexicon by Learning a New Word: Japanese Children's Interpretation of the Meaning of a New Word for a Familiar ArtifactCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2002Etsuko Haryu This research investigated how children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. The existing literature has shown that syntactic form,class information plays an important role in making this kind of inference. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, because Japanese language does not have a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, proper nouns and common nouns, or singular and plural. In Study 1, 12 three,year,old monolingual Japanese children were tested to examine whether they interpreted a new noun associated with a familiar artifact to be a material name or a new label for the object. They interpreted the new word as a new category label for the object, rather than as a name for the material. How children related the new category to the old familiar one was then examined in Studies 2 and 3. The results of Study 2, in which 24 three,year,olds participated, showed that children could flexibly shift between two interpretations using shape information. When the named object had a typical shape for the familiar category, they mapped the new word to a subordinate category. In contrast, when the shape of the named object was atypical, they mapped the new word to a new category that was mutually exclusive to the familiar category by excluding the named object from the familiar category. In Study 3, 12 three,year,olds were tested to examine relative importance of shape and functional information in this inference process. The results of the three studies suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, but the clues are weighed in hierarchical order so that they can determine the single most plausible solution in a given situation when different clues suggest different solutions. [source] Motor cortex involvement during verbal versus non-verbal lip and tongue movementsHUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 2 2002Riitta Salmelin Abstract We evaluated left and right motor cortex involvement during verbal and non-verbal lip and tongue movements in seven healthy subjects using whole-head magnetoencephalography. The movements were paced by tone pips. The non-verbal tasks included a kissing movement and touching the teeth with the tongue. The verbal tasks comprised silent articulation of the Finnish vowel /o/, which requires mouth movement similar to that in the kissing task, pronouncing the same self-selected word repeatedly, and producing a new word for every tone pip. Motor cortex involvement was quantified by task-related suppression and subsequent rebound of the 20-Hz activity. The modulation concentrated to two sites along the central sulcus, identified as the motor face and hand representations. The 20-Hz suppression in the face area was relatively similar during all tasks. The post-movement rebound, however, was significantly left-lateralized during word production. In the non-verbal tasks, hand areas showed pronounced suppression of 20-Hz activity that was significantly diminished for the verbal tasks. The latencies of the 20-Hz suppression in the left and right face representations were correlated across subjects during verbal mouth movements. Increasing linguistic content of lip and tongue movements was thus manifested in spatially more focal motor cortex involvement, left-hemisphere lateralization of face area activation, and correlated timing across hemispheres. Hum. Brain Mapping 16:81,91, 2002. © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Can Infants Use a Nonhuman Agent's Gaze Direction to Establish Word,Object Relations?INFANCY, Issue 4 2009Laura O'Connell Adopting a procedure developed with human speakers, we examined infants' ability to follow a nonhuman agent's gaze direction and subsequently to use its gaze to learn new words. When a programmable robot acted as the speaker (Experiment 1), infants followed its gaze toward the word referent whether or not it coincided with their own focus of attention, but failed to learn a new word. When the speaker was human, infants correctly mapped the words (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when the robot interacted contingently, this did not facilitate infants' word mapping (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that gaze following upon hearing a novel word is not sufficient to learn the referent of the word when the speaker is nonhuman. [source] Do we need a new word for patients?INTERNAL MEDICINE JOURNAL, Issue 6 2000B. R. Nair No abstract is available for this article. [source] The symbolic state: a British experienceJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2003Nicholas O'Shaughnessy Abstract This paper aspires to introduce a new word into the political lexicon. It argues that Britain's ,New' Labour Government embodies a phenomenon for which the word ,spin' is descriptively inadequate. New Labour actually represents something much more radical and important than this,an entire regime whose core competence has lain in the generation of imagery. Its directors recognise that, in a sense, words speak louder than actions, and that the production of the correct imagery is politically more significant than the creation and execution of policy, the old concept of governing. While the paper discusses the ethical and the social consequences of this evolution, it also suggests that such symbolic government is the almost inevitable response of governing elites to an inquisitorial and relentless modern media. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications [source] Reorganizing the Lexicon by Learning a New Word: Japanese Children's Interpretation of the Meaning of a New Word for a Familiar ArtifactCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2002Etsuko Haryu This research investigated how children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. The existing literature has shown that syntactic form,class information plays an important role in making this kind of inference. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, because Japanese language does not have a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, proper nouns and common nouns, or singular and plural. In Study 1, 12 three,year,old monolingual Japanese children were tested to examine whether they interpreted a new noun associated with a familiar artifact to be a material name or a new label for the object. They interpreted the new word as a new category label for the object, rather than as a name for the material. How children related the new category to the old familiar one was then examined in Studies 2 and 3. The results of Study 2, in which 24 three,year,olds participated, showed that children could flexibly shift between two interpretations using shape information. When the named object had a typical shape for the familiar category, they mapped the new word to a subordinate category. In contrast, when the shape of the named object was atypical, they mapped the new word to a new category that was mutually exclusive to the familiar category by excluding the named object from the familiar category. In Study 3, 12 three,year,olds were tested to examine relative importance of shape and functional information in this inference process. The results of the three studies suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, but the clues are weighed in hierarchical order so that they can determine the single most plausible solution in a given situation when different clues suggest different solutions. [source] The Large-Scale Structure of Semantic Networks: Statistical Analyses and a Model of Semantic GrowthCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 1 2005Mark Steyvers Abstract We present statistical analyses of the large-scale structure of 3 types of semantic networks: word associations, WordNet, and Roget's Thesaurus. We show that they have a small-world structure, characterized by sparse connectivity, short average path lengths between words, and strong local clustering. In addition, the distributions of the number of connections follow power laws that indicate a scale-free pattern of connectivity, with most nodes having relatively few connections joined together through a small number of hubs with many connections. These regularities have also been found in certain other complex natural networks, such as the World Wide Web, but they are not consistent with many conventional models of semantic organization, based on inheritance hierarchies, arbitrarily structured networks, or high-dimensional vector spaces. We propose that these structures reflect the mechanisms by which semantic networks grow. We describe a simple model for semantic growth, in which each new word or concept is connected to an existing network by differentiating the connectivity pattern of an existing node. This model generates appropriate small-world statistics and power-law connectivity distributions, and it also suggests one possible mechanistic basis for the effects of learning history variables (age of acquisition, usage frequency) on behavioral performance in semantic processing tasks. [source] Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristicDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2009Krista Byers-Heinlein How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence. [source] Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Lexical Input Processing ApproachFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2004Article first published online: 31 DEC 200, Joe Barcroft PhD These principles emphasize presentation of new words as input, allocation of limited processing resources during vocabulary acquisition, distinct components of vocabulary knowledge (e.g., form, meaning, mapping), and appropriate types of instruction for different stages of development. Empirical support is included. [source] Bilateral medial temporal lobe damage does not affect lexical or grammatical processing: Evidence from amnesic patient H.M.HIPPOCAMPUS, Issue 4 2001Elizabeth A. Kensinger Abstract In the most extensive investigation to date of language in global amnesia, we acquired data from experimental measures and examined longitudinal data from standardized tests, to determine whether language function was preserved in the amnesic patient H.M. The experimental measures indicated that H.M. performed normally on tests of lexical memory and grammatical function, relative to age- and education-matched control participants. Longitudinal data from four Wechsler subtests (Information, Comprehension, Similarities, and Vocabulary), that H.M. had taken 20 times between 1953 (preoperatively) and 2000, indicated consistent performance across time, and provided no evidence of a lexical memory decrement. We conclude that medial temporal lobe structures are not critical for retention and use of already acquired lexical information or for grammatical processing. They are, however, required for acquisition of lexical information, as evidenced in previous studies revealing H.M.'s profound impairment at learning new words. Hippocampus 2001;11:347,360. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Changes in neural activity associated with learning to articulate novel auditory pseudowords by covert repetitionHUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 11 2008Andreas M. Rauschecker Abstract Learning to articulate novel combinations of phonemes that form new words through a small number of auditory exposures is crucial for development of language and our capacity for fluent speech, yet the underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal repetition,suppression effects accompanying such learning and reflecting discrete changes in brain activity due to stimulus-specific fine-tuning of neural representations. In an event-related design, subjects were repeatedly exposed to auditory pseudowords, which they covertly repeated. Covert responses during scanning and postscanning overt responses showed evidence of learning. An extensive set of regions activated bilaterally when listening to and covertly repeating novel pseudoword stimuli. Activity decreased, with repeated exposures, in a subset of these areas mostly in the left hemisphere, including premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal cortex, and cerebellum. The changes most likely reflect more efficient representation of the articulation patterns of these novel words in two connected systems, one involved in the perception of pseudoword stimuli (in the left superior temporal cortex) and one for processing the output of speech (in the left frontal cortex). Both of these systems contribute to vocal learning. Hum Brain Mapp 2008. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Language Experience Shapes the Development of the Mutual Exclusivity BiasINFANCY, Issue 2 2010Carmel Houston-Price Halberda (2003) demonstrated that 17-month-old infants, but not 14- or 16-month-olds, use a strategy known as mutual exclusivity (ME) to identify the meanings of new words. When 17-month-olds were presented with a novel word in an intermodal preferential looking task, they preferentially fixated a novel object over an object for which they already had a name. We explored whether the development of this word-learning strategy is driven by children's experience of hearing only one name for each referent in their environment by comparing the behavior of infants from monolingual and bilingual homes. Monolingual infants aged 17,22 months showed clear evidence of using an ME strategy, in that they preferentially fixated the novel object when they were asked to "look at the dax." Bilingual infants of the same age and vocabulary size failed to show a similar pattern of behavior. We suggest that children who are raised with more than one language fail to develop an ME strategy in parallel with monolingual infants because development of the bias is a consequence of the monolingual child's everyday experiences with words. [source] Can Infants Use a Nonhuman Agent's Gaze Direction to Establish Word,Object Relations?INFANCY, Issue 4 2009Laura O'Connell Adopting a procedure developed with human speakers, we examined infants' ability to follow a nonhuman agent's gaze direction and subsequently to use its gaze to learn new words. When a programmable robot acted as the speaker (Experiment 1), infants followed its gaze toward the word referent whether or not it coincided with their own focus of attention, but failed to learn a new word. When the speaker was human, infants correctly mapped the words (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when the robot interacted contingently, this did not facilitate infants' word mapping (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that gaze following upon hearing a novel word is not sufficient to learn the referent of the word when the speaker is nonhuman. [source] The Role of Task-Induced Involvement and Learner Proficiency in L2 Vocabulary AcquisitionLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2008YouJin Kim Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) proposed a motivational-cognitive construct of task-induced involvement to account for variation in effectiveness among different vocabulary learning tasks. Building upon their original research, this study consisted of two experiments investigating the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary learning. Experiment 1 compared the performance of 64 adult English as a second language (ESL) learners from a range of countries at two different proficiency levels (i.e., matriculated undergraduate students vs. students in an Intensive English Program) to ascertain the effectiveness of three vocabulary tasks with different levels of task-induced involvement. Experiment 2 investigated whether two tasks hypothesized to represent the same level of task-induced involvement would result in equivalent initial learning and retention of target words by 20 adult ESL learners at two different levels of proficiency. The results of Experiment 1 showed that a higher level of learner involvement during the task promoted more effective initial vocabulary learning and better retention of the new words. The findings of Experiment 2 indicated that when different tasks had the same involvement load, they resulted in similar amounts of initial vocabulary learning and retention of new words. The results of the two experiments are discussed in light of the involvement load hypothesis. [source] Influence of First Language Orthographic Experience on Second Language Decoding and Word LearningLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2008Megumi Hamada This study examined the influence of first language (L1) orthographic experiences on decoding and semantic information retention of new words in a second language (L2). Hypotheses were that congruity in L1 and L2 orthographic experiences determines L2 decoding efficiency, which, in turn, affects semantic information encoding and retention. College-level English L2 learners with typologically similar (Korean) and dissimilar (Chinese) L1 backgrounds were participants. Their decoding efficiency was measured by a pseudoword naming task with phonologically regular and irregular conditions. They learned the meaning of the pseudowords paired with pictures. Subsequent recall tasks showed that the Korean group had better overall retention but greater impairment with the irregular pseudowords. These findings suggest that L1 orthographic distance influences L2 word learning processes. [source] ,Theory of Mind' and Tracking Speakers' IntentionsMIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 1-2 2002Francesca Happé Typical theory of mind tasks assess children's ability to attribute a false belief in order to predict or explain an action. According to these standard tasks, young children do not represent the independent (mistaken) beliefs of others until the fourth year,yet long before this, children are able to track speakers' intentions in order to learn new words. Might communication be a privileged domain for theory of mind? In the present study we explored pre-schoolers' ability to track a false belief in order to acquire a novel word. A puppet labeled a novel object in a false belief condition (contents of a box had been switched without her knowledge), and a true belief condition (contents switched in her presence). Children were significantly better at tracking the puppet's false belief in the word-learning task than in a standard false belief test. Possible reasons for this advantage are discussed, and the suggestion made that representation of mental states may emerge precociously in the service of communication. [source] Mindreading, Communication and the Learning of Names for ThingsMIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 1-2 2002Paul Bloom Children are strikingly good at learning the meanings of names for things. There is considerable evidence that they solve this mapping problem through inferring the referential intentions of other people. This mindreading capacity might also underlie children's assumptions that words do not overlap in reference, and that new words are likely to refer to whole objects. Finally, there is some support for the view that the mindreading that underlies word learning is due to a general capacity to infer mental states, not a submodule that is dedicated to communication. [source] Short duration power changes in the EEG during recognition memory for words and facesPSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 5 2000A.P. Burgess Although memory has been widely studied using event-related potentials, memory-related changes in the electroencephalogram (EEG) have been relatively neglected. The aim of this study was to determine whether evidence could be found for memory-related changes in the EEG. EEG was recorded from a sample of healthy volunteers while they performed word and face recognition memory tasks. Data were analyzed using the method of event-related desynchronization. In the theta frequency range there was a short-duration increase in power that occurred in the first 250 ms that was maximal at temporal sites (T5/T6). For words, but not faces, there was a repetition effect in theta such that new words elicited greater synchronization than old words at the midline frontal electrode (Fz). In the alpha frequency range there was a lateralized repetition effect, which occurred from 750 ms. In upper alpha this effect was lateralized in the expected way with greater desynchronization at temporo-parietal sites on the left for words and on the right for faces. For lower alpha, the lateralization was reversed. The meanings of these findings are interpreted in the light of existing models of recognition memory. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||