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Tamis-LeMonda CS, Kachergis G, Masek LR, Gonzalez SL, Soska KC, Herzberg O, Xu M, Adolph KE, Gilmore RO, Bornstein MH, Casasola M, Fausey CM, Frank MC, Goldin-Meadow S, Gros-Louis J, Hirsh-Pasek K, Iverson J, Lew-Williams C, MacWhinney B, Marchman VA, Naigles L, Namy L, Perry LK, Rowe M, Sheya A, Soderstrom M, Song L, Walle E, Warlaumont AS, Yoshida H, Yu C, Yurovsky D. Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English-Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners. Infancy 2024; 29:302-326. [PMID: 38217508 PMCID: PMC11019594 DOI: 10.1111/infa.12571] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/28/2023] [Revised: 11/20/2023] [Accepted: 11/21/2023] [Indexed: 01/15/2024]
Abstract
The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual-language-learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English-Spanish (DLL-ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English-Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish language-variety options. Item-Response Theory analyses applied to Wordbank and Web-CDI data (n = 2603, 12-18 months; n = 6722, 16-36 months; half female; 1% Asian, 3% Black, 2% Hispanic, 30% White, 64% unknown) showed near-perfect associations between DLL-ES and CDI long-form scores. Interviews with 10 Hispanic mothers of 18- to 24-month-olds (2 White, 1 Black, 7 multi-racial; 6 female) provide a proof of concept for the value of the DLL-ES for assessing the vocabularies of DLLs.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Marc H. Bornstein
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, MD, USA
- Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK
- UNICEF, USA
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Laura Namy
- Institute for Education Sciences, Washington, DC, USA
| | | | | | - Adam Sheya
- University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
| | | | | | - Eric Walle
- University of California Merced, Merced, CA, USA
| | | | | | - Chen Yu
- University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
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Piot L, Nazzi T, Boll-Avetisyan N. Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic regularities related to perceptually low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study. Front Psychol 2024; 15:1367240. [PMID: 38533216 PMCID: PMC10964922 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1367240] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/08/2024] [Accepted: 02/22/2024] [Indexed: 03/28/2024] Open
Abstract
Introduction Infants' sensitivity to language-specific phonotactic regularities emerges between 6- and 9- months of age, and this sensitivity has been shown to impact other early processes such as wordform segmentation and word learning. However, the acquisition of phonotactic regularities involving perceptually low-salient phonemes (i.e., phoneme contrasts that are hard to discriminate at an early age), has rarely been studied and prior results show mixed findings. Here, we aimed to further assess infants' acquisition of such regularities, by focusing on the low-salient contrast of /s/- and /ʃ/-initial consonant clusters. Methods Using the headturn preference procedure, we assessed whether French- and German-learning 9-month-old infants are sensitive to language-specific regularities varying in frequency within and between the two languages (i.e., /st/ and /sp/ frequent in French, but infrequent in German, /ʃt/ and /ʃp/ frequent in German, but infrequent in French). Results French-learning infants preferred the frequent over the infrequent phonotactic regularities, but the results for the German-learning infants were less clear. Discussion These results suggest crosslinguistic acquisition patterns, although an exploratory direct comparison of the French- and German-learning groups was inconclusive, possibly linked to low statistical power to detect such differences. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that infants' early phonotactic sensitivities extend to regularities involving perceptually low-salient phoneme contrasts at 9 months, and highlight the importance of conducting cross-linguistic research on such language-specific processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Leonardo Piot
- Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Sciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
- Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, CNRS & Université Paris Cité, Paris, France
| | - Thierry Nazzi
- Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, CNRS & Université Paris Cité, Paris, France
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Abstract
Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M = 24.1 months, SD = 1.39, 35 girls). Ten minutes of interaction for sixty-four father-infant dyads were transcribed and multiple regression analyses were performed to examine the effects of a set of distal and proximal sources of infant influence on paternal LD. Fathers' LD was predicted only by infant language, both standardised language scores and dynamic language measures, and was not predicted by infant age, gender, executive function, or temperament. Findings are discussed in the light of the complex interplay of factors contributing to variability in IDS and the infant's linguistic environment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jean Quigley
- School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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Abstract
To evaluate which features of spoken language aid infant word learning, a corpus of infant-directed speech (M. R. Brent & J. M. Siskind, 2001) was characterized on several linguistic dimensions and statistically related to the infants' vocabulary outcomes word by word. Comprehension (at 12 and 15 months) and production (15 months) were predicted by frequency, frequency of occurrence in one-word utterances, concreteness, utterance length, and typical duration. These features have been proposed to influence learning before, but here their relative contributions were measured. Mothers' data predicted learning in their own children better than in other children; thus, vocabulary is measurably aligned within families. These analyses provide a quantitative basis for claims concerning the relevance of several properties of maternal English speech in facilitating early word learning.
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Thiessen ED, Erickson LC. Discovering words in fluent speech: the contribution of two kinds of statistical information. Front Psychol 2013; 3:590. [PMID: 23335903 PMCID: PMC3547220 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00590] [Citation(s) in RCA: 20] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/30/2012] [Accepted: 12/13/2012] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
To efficiently segment fluent speech, infants must discover the predominant phonological form of words in the native language. In English, for example, content words typically begin with a stressed syllable. To discover this regularity, infants need to identify a set of words. We propose that statistical learning plays two roles in this process. First, it provides a cue that allows infants to segment words from fluent speech, even without language-specific phonological knowledge. Second, once infants have identified a set of lexical forms, they can learn from the distribution of acoustic features across those word forms. The current experiments demonstrate both processes are available to 5-month-old infants. This demonstration of sensitivity to statistical structure in speech, weighted more heavily than phonological cues to segmentation at an early age, is consistent with theoretical accounts that claim statistical learning plays a role in helping infants to adapt to the structure of their native language from very early in life.
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Affiliation(s)
- Erik D. Thiessen
- Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh, PA, USA
| | - Lucy C. Erickson
- Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh, PA, USA
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