Linguistic experience plays a clear role in accounting for variability in sentence comprehension behavior across individuals and across sentence types. We aimed to understand how individual ...differences in reading experience predict reading behavior. Corpus analyses revealed the frequencies with which our experimental items appeared in written and spoken language. We hypothesized that reading experience should affect sentence comprehension most substantially for sentence types that individuals primarily encounter through written language. Readers with more text exposure were faster and more accurate readers overall, but they read sentence types biased to written language particularly faster than did readers with less text exposure. We see clear effects of text exposure on sentence comprehension in ways that allow explicit links between written and spoken corpus statistics and behavior. We discuss theoretical implications of effects of text exposure for experience-based approaches to sentence processing.
Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that greater statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One ...potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially an important source of linguistic input for many children. We constructed a corpus of 100 children's picture books and compared word type and token counts in that sample and a matched sample of child-directed speech. Overall, the picture books contained more unique word types than the child-directed speech. Further, individual picture books generally contained more unique word types than length-matched, child-directed conversations. The text of picture books may be an important source of vocabulary for young children, and these findings suggest a mechanism that underlies the language benefits associated with reading to children.
Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on ...several syntactic differences between the text of children’s picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which picture book text may systematically differ from typical child-directed speech. The analyses show that picture books contain more rare and complex sentence types, including passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses, than does child-directed speech. These differences in the patterns of language contained in picture books and typical child-directed speech suggest that one important means by which picture book reading may come to be associated with improved language outcomes is by providing children with types of complex language that might be otherwise rare in their input.
There is still much debate about the nature of the experiential and maturational changes that take place during childhood to bring about the sophisticated language abilities of an adult. The present ...study investigated text exposure as a possible source of linguistic experience that plays a role in the development of adult-like language abilities. Corpus analyses of object and passive relative clauses (Object: The book that the woman carried; Passive: The book that was carried by the woman) established the frequencies of these sentence types in child-directed speech and children's literature. We found that relative clauses of either type were more frequent in the written corpus, and that the ratio of passive to object relatives was much higher in the written corpus as well. This analysis suggests that passive relative clauses are much more frequent in a child's linguistic environment if they have high rates of text exposure. We then elicited object and passive relative clauses using a picture-description production task with 8- and 12-year-old children and adults. Both group and individual differences were consistent with the corpus analyses, such that older individuals and individuals with more text exposure produced more passive relative clauses. These findings suggest that the qualitatively different patterns of text versus speech may be an important source of linguistic experience for the development of adult-like language behavior.
The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of ...the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus (6.5 million words) of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk.
Bilingual speakers sometimes codeswitch, or alternate between languages, in a single utterance. We investigated the effect of lexical accessibility of words, defined as the ease with which a speaker ...retrieves and produces a word, on codeswitching in Spanish-English bilinguals. We first developed a novel sentence-production paradigm to elicit naturalistic codeswitches in the lab. We then predicted items on which speakers were more or less likely to codeswitch as a consequence of the relative lexical accessibility of those items’ labels across a speaker’s two languages. In a Spanish sentence-production task, greater lexical accessibility in English was associated with an increased rate of codeswitching and longer speaking durations on trials on which speakers codeswitched, as well as on trials on which speakers did not codeswitch. Codeswitches were more frequent on trials where speakers likely experienced more competition from the other-language label, suggesting that codeswitching may be a tool that bilingual speakers use to alleviate difficulty associated with cross-language lexical competition. Given findings that comprehenders are able to learn lexical distributions and subtle acoustic cues to predict upcoming codeswitches, the present work suggests that demands on speakers during language production may play a role in explaining how those patterns come to exist in the language environment.
The language backgrounds and experiences of bilinguals have been primarily characterized using self-report questionnaires and laboratory tasks, although each of these assessments have their strengths ...and weaknesses. The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an audio recording device, has recently become more prominent as a method of assessing real-world language use. We investigated the relationships among these three assessment tools, to understand the shared variance in how these measures evaluated various aspects of the bilingual experience. Participants were 60 Southern California heritage bilingual college students who spoke a variety of heritage languages and began to learn English between the ages of 0-to 12-years. Participants completed both self-report and laboratory-based measures of language proficiency and use, and they wore the EAR for 4 days to capture representative samples of their day-to-day heritage language (HL) use. The results indicated that self-reported HL use and English age of acquisition were significant predictors of real-world language use as measured by the EAR. In addition, self-reported HL proficiency and laboratory-based HL proficiency, as measured by verbal fluency, were mutually predictive. While some variability was shared across different assessments, ultimately, none of the measures correlated strongly and each measure captured unique information about the heritage bilingual language experience, highlighting the dissociation between language experience measured at a single point in time and an accumulated life history with a heritage language. These findings may provide guidance for bilingualism researchers about which assessment tool, or combination of tools, may be best for their specific research questions.
This study investigated long-term speech intelligibility outcomes in 63 prelingually deaf children, adolescents, and young adults who received cochlear implants (CIs) before age 7 (M = 2;11 ...years;months, range = 0;8-6;3) and used their implants for at least 7 years (M = 12;1, range = 7;0-22;5).
Speech intelligibility was assessed using playback methods with naïve, normal-hearing listeners.
Mean intelligibility scores were lower than scores obtained from an age- and nonverbal IQ-matched, normal-hearing control sample, although the majority of CI users scored within the range of the control sample. Our sample allowed us to investigate the contribution of several demographic and cognitive factors to speech intelligibility. CI users who used their implant for longer periods of time exhibited poorer speech intelligibility scores. Crucially, results from a hierarchical regression model suggested that this difference was due to more conservative candidacy criteria in CI users with more years of use. No other demographic variables accounted for significant variance in speech intelligibility scores beyond age of implantation and amount of spoken language experience (assessed by communication mode and family income measures).
Many factors that have been found to contribute to individual differences in language outcomes in normal-hearing children also contribute to long-term CI users' ability to produce intelligible speech.
The role of visual salience on utterance form was investigated in a picture description study. Participants heard spoken questions about animate or inanimate entities in a picture and produced a ...relative clause in response. Visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to yield longer initiation latencies and to be described with passive relative clauses more than visually salient inanimates. We suggest that the participants’ question-answering task can change as a function of visual salience of entities in the picture. Less salient entities require a longer visual search of the scene, which causes the speaker to notice or attend more to the non-target competitors in the picture. As a result, it becomes more important in answering the question for the speaker to contrast the target item with a salient competitor. This effect is different from other effects of visual salience, which tend to find that more salient entities take more prominent grammatical roles in the sentence. We interpret this discrepancy as evidence that visual salience does not have a single effect on sentence production, but rather its effect is modulated by task and linguistic context.
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