According to a “selective” (as opposed to “instructive”) model of human language capacity, people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity (the “poverty of the stimulus”) is bridged by genetically provided information. Hence any hypothesis about the linguistic genotype (or “Universal Grammar,” UG) has consequences for what experience is needed and what form people's mature capacities (or “grammars”) will take. This BBS target article discusses the “trigger experience,” that is, the experience that actually (...) affects a child's linguistic development. It is argued that this must be a subset of a child's total linguistic experience and hence that much of what a child hears has no consequence for the form of the eventual grammar. UG filters experience and provides an upper bound on what constitutes the triggering experience. This filtering effect can often be seen in the way linguistic capacity can change between generations. Children only need access to robust structures of minimal (“degree-0”) complexity. Everything can be learned from simple, unembedded “domains” (a grammatical concept involved in defining an expression's logical form). Children do not need access to more complex structures. (shrink)

This paper presents an implemented computational model of word acquisition which learns directly from raw multimodal sensory input. Set in an information theoretic framework, the model acquires a lexicon by finding and statistically modeling consistent cross‐modal structure. The model has been implemented in a system using novel speech processing, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms. In evaluations the model successfully performed speech segmentation, word discovery and visual categorization from spontaneous infant‐directed speech paired with video images of single objects. These results (...) demonstrate the possibility of using state‐of‐the‐art techniques from sensory pattern recognition and machine learning to implement cognitive models which can process raw sensor data without the need for human transcription or labeling. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

Interpreting a seemingly simple function word like “or,” “behind,” or “more” can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural‐network‐based visual question answering models apparently can learn to use function words as part of answering questions about complex visual scenes. In this paper, we study what these models learn about function words, in the hope of better understanding how the (...) meanings of these words can be learned by both models and children. We show that recurrent models trained on visually grounded language learn gradient semantics for function words requiring spatial and numerical reasoning. Furthermore, we find that these models can learn the meanings of logical connectives and and or without any prior knowledge of logical reasoning as well as early evidence that they are sensitive to alternative expressions when interpreting language. Finally, we show that word learning difficulty is dependent on the frequency of models' input. Our findings offer proof‐of‐concept evidence that it is possible to learn the nuanced interpretations of function words in a visually grounded context by using non‐symbolic general statistical learning algorithms, without any prior knowledge of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

The relationship between a biological process and a behavioral trait indicates a proximate mechanism by which natural selection can act. In that context, examining an aspect of infant health is one method of investigating the adaptive significance of infant-directed speech (ID speech), and it could help to explain the widespread use of this communication style. The correlation between infant growth and infant-directed speech is positive and significant, and provides a vehicle for testing evolutionary history hypotheses.

Evidence from numerous studies using the visual world paradigm has revealed both that spoken language can rapidly guide attention in a related visual scene and that scene information can immediately influence comprehension processes. These findings motivated the coordinated interplay account (Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006) of situated comprehension, which claims that utterance‐mediated attention crucially underlies this closely coordinated interaction of language and scene processing. We present a recurrent sigma‐pi neural network that models the rapid use of scene information, exploiting an utterance‐mediated (...) attentional mechanism that directly instantiates the CIA. The model is shown to achieve high levels of performance (both with and without scene contexts), while also exhibiting hallmark behaviors of situated comprehension, such as incremental processing, anticipation of appropriate role fillers, as well as the immediate use, and priority, of depicted event information through the coordinated use of utterance‐mediated attention to the scene. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the design of robots might benefit from interactions that are similar to caregiver-child interactions, which is tailored to children's respective capacities to a high degree. However, so far little is known about how people adapt their tutoring behaviour to robots and whether robots can evoke input that is similar to child-directed interaction. The paper presents detailed analyses of speakers' linguistic behaviour and non-linguistic behaviour, such as action demonstration, in two comparable situations: In one experiment, parents (...) described and explained to their nonverbal infants the use of certain everyday objects; in the other experiment, participants tutored a simulated robot on the same objects. The results, which show considerable differences between the two situations on almost all measures, are discussed in the light of the computer-as-social-actor paradigm and the register hypothesis. Keywords: child-directed speech (CDS); motherese; robotese; motionese; register theory; social communication; human-robot interaction (HRI); computers-as-social-actors; mindless transfer. (shrink)

Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an “embedded listener model,” where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents’ spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects their children's understanding of spatial relations and spatial (...) terms. Adults described the positions of targets in spatial arrays to their children or to the adult experimenter. Arrays were designed so that targets could not be identified unless spatial relationships within the array were encoded and described. Parents of 3–4-year-old children encoded relationships in ways that were well-matched to their children's level of spatial language. These encodings differed from those of the same relationships in speech to the adult experimenter. In contrast, parents of individuals with severe spatial impairments did not show clear evidence of sensitivity to their children's level of spatial language. The results provide evidence for an embedded listener model in the domain of spatial language and indicate conditions under which the ability to model listener knowledge may be more challenging. (shrink)

In the present study we analyse a sample of Irish Child Directed Speech in terms of item-based constructions and the communicative intents which they express. The study is based on the speech of an Irish native speaker engaged in daily activities with her son (aged 1;9). The findings of the analyses indicate the high degree of lexical specificity attested in the sample; in total 35 item-based frames account for just under 70% of analysed utterances. In most cases there was a (...) one-to-one relationship between item-based frame and communicative intent. However, of particular interest was the clustering of structurally related frames around specific functions. We propose that this relationship highlights the role of communicative intent in the organisation of structural linguistic knowledge. (shrink)

The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO (...) form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item‐based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item‐based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item‐based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them. (shrink)

Результаты недавних кросс-лингвистических исследований инпута предоставили новые ар-гументы к неутихающей дискуссии о ведущих факторах речевого онтогенеза. Анализ различных способов реагирования взрослого на детскую речевую продукцию, интерпретируемых как позитивные / негативные свидетельства, показы-вает, что инпут помогает ребенку обнаружить и запомнить правильное / ошибочное. Полученные данные способны существенно ослабить тезис о «лингвистической бедности» обращенной к ребенку речи взрослого, а значит – и о ключевой роли «врожденных языковых структур» в про-цессе освоения языка. Предполагается также, что взрослый довольно чувствителен к детским аграмматизмам. Однако остается (...) неизвестным, ошибки каких типов провоцируют негативный инпут в большей степени, поскольку практически отсутствуют исследования, выполненные на ма-териале морфологически богатых языков. Кроме того, обнаружение предпочтительных тактик реагирования взрослых – носителей разных язы-ков – ставит вопрос о факторах, обусловливающих качественное своеобразие их «реактивного репер-туара». В статье обсуждаются прагматические, коммуникативные и структурные характеристики реплик-реакций русскоязычного взрослого на ошибочные и «неполные» глагольные выска-зывания ребенка раннего возраста. Результаты сопоставляются с аналогичными данными, полученными при анализе инпута языков, разли-чающихся с точки зрения богатства флективной системы, – литовского, французского и немецкого. (shrink)