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Lila San Roque; Elisabeth Norcliffe; Asifa Majid – Cognitive Science, 2024
Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of…
Descriptors: English, Verbs, Sensory Experience, Perception
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Ercenur Ünal; Kevser Kirbasoglu; Dilay Z. Karadöller; Beyza Sümer; Asli Özyürek – Cognitive Science, 2025
In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…
Descriptors: Nonverbal Communication, Cognitive Mapping, Spatial Ability, Language Processing
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Trott, Sean; Jones, Cameron; Chang, Tyler; Michaelov, James; Bergen, Benjamin – Cognitive Science, 2023
Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…
Descriptors: Models, Language Processing, Beliefs, Child Development
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Fitch, Allison; Arunachalam, Sudha; Lieberman, Amy M. – Cognitive Science, 2021
Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use…
Descriptors: American Sign Language, Language Acquisition, Simulation, Cues
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Cruz Blandón, María Andrea; Cristia, Alejandrina; Räsänen, Okko – Cognitive Science, 2023
Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…
Descriptors: Meta Analysis, Infants, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics
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Guevara-Rukoz, Adriana; Cristia, Alejandrina; Ludusan, Bogdan; Thiollière, Roland; Martin, Andrew; Mazuka, Reiko; Dupoux, Emmanuel – Cognitive Science, 2018
We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented…
Descriptors: Statistical Analysis, Phonemes, Phonology, Infants
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Landau, Barbara; Johannes, Kristen; Skordos, Dimitrios; Papafragou, Anna – Cognitive Science, 2017
Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English "in" and "on" are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their…
Descriptors: Spatial Ability, Language Acquisition, Phrase Structure, Form Classes (Languages)
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Twomey, Katherine E.; Ma, Lizhi; Westermann, Gert – Cognitive Science, 2018
Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection…
Descriptors: Acoustics, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Behavior Change
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Ambridge, Ben – Cognitive Science, 2013
A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action,…
Descriptors: Generalization, Comparative Analysis, Verbs, Grammar
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Yu, Chen; Ballard, Dana H.; Aslin, Richard N. – Cognitive Science, 2005
We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Testing, Comparative Analysis, Learning Processes