{"id":128790,"date":"2024-11-22T12:34:48","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T05:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=128790"},"modified":"2024-11-22T12:34:48","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T05:34:48","slug":"toddlers-use-grammar-hints-to-unlock-the-meaning-of-new-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=128790","title":{"rendered":"Toddlers Use Grammar Hints to Unlock the Meaning of New Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"fluid\"\r\n     data-ad-layout-key=\"-fb+5w+4e-db+86\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"7910942971\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><strong>Summary: <\/strong>Toddlers use subtle grammatical cues in sentences to infer the meanings of new words. Researchers found that children rely on \u201cfocus\u201d signals\u2014emphasis or stress in speech\u2014rather than assuming words are mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n<p>Experiments with 106 children showed that focused speech, such as emphasizing a word, led kids to associate it with a new object. This new insight reshapes our understanding of early language learning and highlights the sophisticated linguistic abilities young children already possess.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Key Facts:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Toddlers use grammatical focus cues, not innate exclusivity, to learn new words.<\/li>\n<li>Experiments showed that emphasis on a word increased children\u2019s likelihood to treat it as referring to a new object.<\/li>\n<li>This finding aligns with the idea that children learn language by leveraging their existing linguistic knowledge.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Source: <\/strong>MIT<\/p>\n<p><strong>As young children, how do we build our vocabulary? Even by age 1, many infants seem to think that if they hear a new word, it means something different from the words they already know. But why they think so has remained subject to inquiry among scholars for the last 40 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A new study carried out at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab offers a novel insight into the matter: Sentences contain\u00a0subtle hints in their grammar that tell young children about the meaning of new words.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><picture fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-106431\"><source type=\"image\/webp\" srcset=\"https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience.jpg.webp 1200w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-300x200.jpg.webp 300w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-770x513.jpg.webp 770w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-1155x770.jpg.webp 1155w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-370x247.jpg.webp 370w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-293x195.jpg.webp 293w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-150x100.jpg.webp 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\"\/><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" src=\"https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience.jpg\" alt=\"This is a drawing of a toy fox and a child with a speech bubble saying &quot;blicket&quot; and &quot;toy&quot;.\" srcset=\"https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-770x513.jpg 770w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-1155x770.jpg 1155w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-370x247.jpg 370w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-293x195.jpg 293w, https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/files\/2024\/11\/language-learning-grammar-neuroscience-150x100.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\"\/> <\/picture><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">If the new hypothesis is correct, the researchers may have developed a more robust explanation about how children correctly apply new words. Credit: Neuroscience News<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The finding, based on experiments with 2-year-olds, suggests that even very young kids are capable of absorbing grammatical cues from language and leveraging that information to acquire new words.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven at a surprisingly young age, kids have sophisticated knowledge of the grammar of sentences and can use that to learn the meanings of new words,\u201d says Athulya Aravind, an associate professor of linguistics at MIT.<\/p>\n<p>The new insight stands in contrast to a prior explanation for how children build vocabulary: that they rely on the concept of \u201cmutual exclusivity,\u201d meaning they treat each new word as corresponding to a new object or category. Instead, the new research shows how extensively children respond directly to grammatical information when interpreting words.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor us it\u2019s very exciting because it\u2019s a very simple idea that explains so much about how children understand language,\u201d says Gabor Brody, a postdoc at Brown University, who is the first author of the paper.<\/p>\n<p>The paper is titled, \u201cWhy Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?\u201d It is published in advance online form in\u00a0<em>Psychological Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The authors are Brody; Roman Feiman, the Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and Linguistics at Brown; and Aravind, the Alfred Henry and\u00a0Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor in MIT\u2019s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Focusing on focus<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many scholars have thought that young children, when learning new words, have an innate bias toward mutual exclusivity, which could explain how children learn some of their new words.<\/p>\n<p>However, the concept of mutual exclusivity has never been airtight: Words like \u201cbat\u201d refer to multiple kinds of objects, while any object can be described using countlessly many words. For instance a rabbit can be called not only a \u201crabbit\u201d or a \u201cbunny,\u201d but also an \u201canimal,\u201d or a \u201cbeauty,\u201d and in some contexts even a \u201cdelicacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite this lack of perfect one-to-one mapping between words and objects, mutual exclusivity has still been posited as a strong tendency in children\u2019s word learning.<\/p>\n<p>What Aravind, Brody, and Fieman propose is that children have no such tendency, and instead rely on so-called \u201cfocus\u201d signals to decide what a new word means. Linguists use the term \u201cfocus\u201d to refer to the way we emphasize or stress certain words to signal some kind of contrast. Depending on what is focused, the same sentence can have different implications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCarlos\u00a0gave Lewis a\u00a0<em>Ferrari<\/em>\u201d implies contrast with other possible cars \u2014 he could have given Lewis a Mercedes. But \u201cCarlos gave\u00a0<em>Lewis<\/em>\u00a0a Ferrari\u201d implies contrast with other people \u2014 he could have given Alexandra a Ferrari.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers\u2019 experiments manipulated focus in three experiments with a total of 106 children. The participants watched videos of a cartoon fox who asked them to point to different objects.<\/p>\n<p>The first experiment established how focus influences kids\u2019 choice between two objects when they hear a label, like \u201ctoy,\u201d that could, in principle, correspond to either of the two.<\/p>\n<p>After giving a name to one of the two objects (\u201cLook, I am pointing to the blicket\u201d), the fox told the child, \u201cNow you point to the toy!\u201d Children were divided into two groups. One group heard \u201ctoy\u201d without emphasis, while the other heard it with emphasis.<\/p>\n<p>In the first version, \u201cblicket\u201d and \u201ctoy\u201d plausibly refer to the same object. But in the second version, the added focus, through intonation, implies that \u201ctoy\u201d contrasts with the previously discussed \u201cblicket.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Without focus, only 24 percent of the respondents thought the words were mutually exclusive, whereas with the focus created by emphasizing \u201ctoy,\u201d 89 percent of participants thought \u201cblicket\u201d and \u201ctoy\u201d referred to different objects.<\/p>\n<p>The second and third experiments showed that focus is not just key when it comes to words like \u201ctoy,\u201d but it also affects the interpretation of new words children have never encountered before, like \u201cwug\u201d or \u201cdax.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If a new word was said without focus, children thought the word meant the previously named object 71 percent of the time. But when hearing the new word spoken with focus, they thought it must refer to a new object 87 percent of the time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven though they know nothing about this new word, when it was focused, that still told them something: Focus communicated to children the presence of a contrasting alternative, and they correspondingly understood the noun to refer to an object that had not previously been labeled,\u201d Aravind explains.<\/p>\n<p>She adds: \u201cThe particular claim we\u2019re making is that there is no inherent bias in children toward mutual exclusivity. The only reason we make the corresponding inference is because focus tells you that the word means something different from another word. When focus goes away, children don\u2019t draw those exclusivity inferences any more.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The researchers believe the full set of experiments sheds new light on the issue.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEarlier explanations of mutual exclusivity introduced a whole new problem,\u201d Feiman says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf kids assume words are mutually exclusive, how do they learn words that are not? After all, you can call the same animal either a rabbit or a bunny, and kids have to learn both of those at some point.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur finding explains why this isn\u2019t actually a problem. Kids won\u2019t think the new word is mutually exclusive with the old word by default, unless adults tell them that it is \u2014 all adults have to do if the new word is not mutually exclusive is just say it without focusing it, and they\u2019ll naturally do that if they\u2019re thinking about it as compatible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Learning language from language<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The experiment, the researchers note, is the result of interdisciplinary research bridging psychology and linguistics \u2014 in this case, mobilizing the linguistics concept of focus to address an issue of interest in both fields.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are hopeful this will be a paper that shows that small, simple theories have a place in psychology,\u201d Brody says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is a very small theory, not a huge model of the mind, but it completely flips the switch on some phenomena we thought we understood.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If the new hypothesis is correct, the researchers may have developed a more robust explanation about how children correctly apply new words.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAn influential idea in language development is that children can use their existing knowledge of language to learn more language,\u201d Aravind says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re in a sense building on that idea, and saying that even in the simplest cases, aspects of language that children already know, in this case an understanding of focus, help them grasp the meanings of unknown words.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The scholars acknowledge that more studies could further advance our knowledge about the issue. Future research, they note in the paper, could reexamine prior studies about mutual exclusivity, record and study naturalistic interactions between parents and children to see how focus is used, and examine the issue in other languages, especially those marking focus in alternate ways, such as word order.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Funding: <\/strong>The research was supported, in part, by a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship awarded to Feiman.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">About this language, learning, and neurodevelopment research news<\/h2>\n<p class=\"has-background\" style=\"background-color:#ffffe8\"><strong>Author: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/news.mit.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Peter Dizikes\u00a0<\/a><br \/><strong>Source: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/news.mit.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MIT<\/a><br \/><strong>Contact: <\/strong>Peter Dizikes\u00a0 \u2013 MIT<br \/><strong>Image: <\/strong>The image is credited to Neuroscience News<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-background\" style=\"background-color:#ffffe8\"><strong>Original Research: <\/strong>Closed access.<br \/>\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/09567976241287732\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?<\/a>\u201d by Athulya Aravind et al. <em>Psychological Science<\/em><\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-pale-cyan-blue-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-pale-cyan-blue-background-color has-background\"\/>\n<p><strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>How do children learn what a word means when its uses are consistent with many possible meanings?<\/p>\n<p>One influential idea is that children rely on an inductive bias that ensures that novel words get assigned distinct meanings from known words\u2014<em>mutual exclusivity<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Here, we explore the possibility that mutual-exclusivity phenomena do not reflect a bias but rather information encoded in the message.<\/p>\n<p> Learners might effectively be told when (and when not) to assume that word meanings are mutually exclusive. In three experiments (<em>N<\/em>\u00a0= 106 from across the United States; ages 2 years, 0 months\u22122 years, 11 months), we show that 2-year-olds only assumed that novel words have distinct meanings if the words were spoken with\u00a0<em>focus<\/em>, an information-structural marker of contrast.<\/p>\n<p>Without focus, we found no mutual exclusivity; novel words were understood to label familiar objects.<\/p>\n<p>These results provide a novel account of mutual exclusivity and demonstrate an early emerging understanding of focus and information structure.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- Form created by Optin Forms plugin by WPKube: create beautiful optin forms with ease! --> <!-- https:\/\/wpkube.com\/ --><!--optinforms-form5-container--> <!-- \/ Optin Forms --> <\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"fluid\"\r\n     data-ad-layout-key=\"-fb+5w+4e-db+86\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"7910942971\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><div data-type=\"_mgwidget\" data-widget-id=\"1660802\">\r\n<\/div>\r\n<script>(function(w,q){w[q]=w[q]||[];w[q].push([\"_mgc.load\"])})(window,\"_mgq\");\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/neurosciencenews.com\/grammar-neurodevelopment-language-28109\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summary: Toddlers use subtle grammatical cues in sentences to infer the meanings of new words. Researchers found that children rely on \u201cfocus\u201d signals\u2014emphasis or stress in speech\u2014rather than assuming words &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/?p=128790\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8628],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotvideos24.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}