The main goal, already presented on the past blog post, of the experiments done during my internship is to see how semantic seed is used to infer a syntactic context and how, this last one, helps us in word categorisation. In other words, to study the existent synergies between semantics and lexical acquisition. To study it, we have been preparing two experiments. The first (that we will call ‘Inference’) is designed for babies from 3 to 4 years old. The second one (this one, we will call it ‘Homophones’), is for babies from 30 to 36 months old. If the Homophone experiment works, the objective is to do it with 20 m.o. babies, shown to be able to categorise new-words’ syntactic category by exploiting function words (Bernal, Lidz, Millotte, & Christophe, 2007; Cauvet et al., 2014; Haryu & Kajikawa, 2016; Shi & Melançon, 2010; Waxman, Lidz, Braun, & Lavin, 2009; Zangl & Fernald, 2007).
Methods The different syntactic context will be presented in two times. The first one will be a five-minutes video composed by four different stories. Each story containing 15 pronouns and 15 articles: the substitution will be to 15 ko’s no matter in which condition are we. The second one will be a practice where the babies will see the video of a known-action and of a known-object at the same time that they listen to the det/pron + noun/verb of the video (for example a video of a girl sleeping at the same time that they listen to ‘look! She’s sleeping’ or ‘look! Ko is sleeping’). So then they will be capable to learn in a different way the new syntactic context. To see where do they look, we use an eye tracker. The test part (to see if they have learned the new syntactic context) will be different for each experiment:
Expected results
What we expect is to confirm The Semantic Seed Hypothesis (Christophe et al. 2016): thanks to a semantic seed, babies would be able to learn new syntactic context (with new function words) and use it to infer the meaning of new words or to recognise between two homophones. References Bernal, S., Lidz, J., Millotte, S., & Christophe, A. (2007). Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning. Language Learning and Development, 3(4), 325–341. http://doi.org/10.1080/15475440701542609 Cauvet, E., Limissuri, R., Millotte, S., Skoruppa, K., Cabrol, D., & Christophe, A. (2014). Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds. Language Learning and Development, 10(1), 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2012.757970 Christophe, A., Dautriche, I., de Carvalho, A., & Brusini, P. (2016). Bootstrapping the Syntactic Bootstrapper. In Proceedings of the 40 th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press, 75-88. de Carvalho, A., Dautriche, I., Lin, I. & Christophe, A. (2017). Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers. Cognition, 163, 67-79. de Carvalho, A., He, A. X., Lidz, J., & Christophe, A. (2015). 18-month-olds use the relationship between prosodic and syntactic structures to constrain the meaning of novel words. 40th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA - USA; November, 2015 Haryu, E., & Kajikawa, S. (2016). Use of bound morphemes (noun particles) in word segmentation by Japanese-learning infants. Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 18–27. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.11.007 Shi, R., & Melançon, A. (2010). Syntactic Categorization in French-Learning Infants. Infancy, 15(5), 517–533. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00022.x Waxman, S. R., Lidz, J. L., Braun, I. E., & Lavin, T. (2009). Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes. Cognitive Psychology, 59(1), 67–95. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.02.001 Zangl, R. &, & Fernald, A. (2007). Increasing Flexibility in Children’s Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech. Language & Learning Development, 3, 199–231.
1 Comment
Table 1. Sentence with function words and content words deleted. We can observe that, while when function words are deleted we can still understand the meaning of the sentence; when content words are deleted we can not. Function words can also help us categorise content words in their different categories (noun, verb, adjective and adverb). For example, if I say “she blickets”, you will classify ‘blickets’ as a verb, however if I say “the blickets” you will classify ‘blickets’ as an object now. This shows us that the choice of function words creates a syntactic context that helps us categorise novel content words (Bernal et al., 2007; Shi and Melançon 2010; de Carvalho et al., 2016). This process is called syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990).
Figure 1. Semantic Seed Hypothesis. By using the semantic seed and some memorised context where this semantic seed appears, the baby can get to know some function words. Then, they will be able to relate these function words to syntactic contexts that will help them to categorise novel words. More precisely, the experiments we are running at the BabyLab (LSCP), in which I take part during my internship, try to test the validity of the Semantic Seed Hypothesis. To know how do we do it, read my next blogpost!
References: Bernal, S., Lidz, J., Millotte, S., & Christophe, A. (2007). Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning. Language Learning and Development, 3 (4), 325–341. http://doi.org/10.1080/15475440701542609 de Carvalho, A., Lidz, J., Tieu, L., Bleam, T., & Christophe, A. (2016). English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(6), EL216-EL222 Christophe, A., Dautriche, I., de Carvalho, A., & Brusini, P. (2016). Bootstrapping the Syntactic Bootstrapper. In Proceedings of the 40th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press, 75-88. Gleitman, L. (1990). The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings. Language Acquisition, 1, 3–55. Shi, R., & Melançon, A. (2010). Syntactic Categorization in French-Learning Infants. Infancy, 15(5), 517–533. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00022.x |