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Under Construction
| The representations and processes children (and adults) use to identify words must permit them both to abstract over many sources of variability in the sounds of words, but also learn the details of how sounds are affected by their contexts in the native language. With Barbara Church at S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, we have been exploring what kinds of information children encode about the sounds of words. We have found that even very young children, like adults, encode both relatively abstract and highly specific information about the sounds of words. | Each experiment begins with a Study phase in which children simply listen to some set of familiar words, made-up words, or sentences. They later participate in a Test phase in which they hear more items (words, made-up words, etc.), and try to identify them. We vary the relationship between study and test items to determine what children encode about the study items. We use a variety of tasks to measure word identification accuracy -- eliciated imitation, or (with familiar words) latency to look at a named target picture. |
| Related publications:
Church, B. A., & Fisher, C., (1998). Long-term auditory word priming in preschoolers: Implicit memory support for language acquisition. Journal of Memory & Language, 39, 523-542. Fisher, C., & Church, B. A. (2001). Learning to identify spoken
words. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on
Language
Fisher, C., & Church, B. A. (2001). Implicit memory support for language acquisition. In J. Weissenborn & B. Hoehle (Eds.), Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic, and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition (pp. 47-69). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fisher, C., Hunt, C. M., Chambers, K., & Church, B. A. (2001). Abstraction and specificity in preschoolers' representations of novel spoken words. Journal of Memory & Language, 45, 665-687. Fisher, C., Church, B. A., & Chambers, K. (in press). Learning to identify spoken words. In D. G. Hall & S. R. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a lexicon. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. |
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| As adults, we routinely use the syntactic structure of a sentence to compute its meaning. In "John hits Bill," the placement and syntactic marking of John and Bill in the sentence tells us which is the guilty party and which the victim. The main claim of the syntactic bootstrapping theory is that precursors of these links between structure and meaning guide children in learning the meanings of verbs and other relational terms. This claim is supported by many studies showing that children between about 2 and 5 years of age take novel verbs in different sentence structures to have different meanings (e.g., Fisher, 1996; Naigles, 1990). Some of our recent research asks how this process might begin. That is, what aspects of sentence structure might children figure out relatively early in the process of learning their native language, and how might these influence the interpretation of early verbs? We explore how children at 2 years of age and just under 2 use simple features of sentences like word order and the number of nouns in the sentence to determine what a new verb means. |
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In the past several years, we have begun to use a preferential looking comprehension task to ask how children interpret new words. Children watch two side-by-side videos while hearing a single, centrally-presented soundtrack. We teach the children made-up verbs, and present the verbs to different groups of children in different syntactic structures. By coding the children's visual fixations to the two videos as they hear the soundtrack, we can determine whether even young children have reasonable biases for the interpretation of word order in transitive sentences (e.g., does "The duck is blicking the bunny" mean something different from "The bunny is blicking the duck"?) and whether their interpretations of transitive and intransitive verbs differ in predictable ways. |
Related Publications:
Fisher, C., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (1991). On the semantic content of subcategorization frames. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 331-392.
Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S., & Gleitman, L. R. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92, 333-375. [Reprinted in L. R. Gleitman & B. Landau (Eds.), The Acquisition of the Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]
Fisher, C. (1994). Structure and meaning in the verb lexicon: Input for a syntax-aided verb learning procedure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 473-518.
Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in children's interpretation of sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 41-81.
Fisher, C. (2000). From form to meaning: A role for structural analogy in the acquisition of language. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 27(pp. 1-53). New York: Academic Press.
Fisher, C. (2000). Simple structural guides to sentence interpretation: On starting with next to nothing. In E. V. Clark, (Ed.), Proceedings of the 30th Stanford Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Budwig, N., Clancy, P. M., & Fisher, C. (2000). Transitivity and verb arguments in acquisition. In E. V. Clark, (Ed.), Proceedings of the 30th Stanford Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Fisher, C. (2001). Partial sentence structure as an early constraint on language acquisition. To appear in B. Landau, J. Sabini, J. Jonides, & E. L. Newport (Eds.), Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman (pp. 275-290). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, C. (2002). The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition: A reply to Tomasello (2000) Cognition, 82, 259-278.
Fisher, C., & Gleitman, L. R. (in press). Breaking the linguistic code: Current issues in early language learning. In H. F. Pashler (Series Ed.) and C. R. Gallistel (Volume Ed.), Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Vol 1: Learning and motivation. (3rd ed.) New York: Wiley.
Fisher, C. (in press). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds' interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science.