The Influence of Perceptual Salience on Vocabulary Acquisition

1
The Influence of Perceptual Salience on
Vocabulary Acquisition Judith Goodman, PhD,
Michelle Clark, Kathryn Brady Department of
Communication Science Disorders University of
Missouri-Columbia

• Background
• Children exposed to English learn a
  disproportionately high number of nouns.
• One factor influencing this noun bias may be
  salience of nouns in the input (Nelson, 1973
  Gentner, 1982 Bornstein Cote, 2004).
• One property that contributes to noun salience is
  their frequent occurrence in utterance-final
  position (Gentner, 1982 Slobin, 1970).
• Less is known about how words from other
  syntactic categories are used in speech to
  children. It is possible that they are also
  highlighted.
• Children exposed to Subject-Object-Verb languages
  such as Mandarin do not show a noun bias. This
  may be, in part, due to the utterance-final
  position of verbs (Tardif, T., Gelman, S. A.,
  Xu, F., 1999 Tardif, T., Shatz, M Naigles, L.,
  1997)
• Examining the way in which words from different
  syntactic categories are used in language input
  may help us to understand the role of perceptual
  salience in word learning.

• Results
• TNs occurred overwhelmingly in salient
  positions (isolation and sentence final) (97).
• TVs also occurred in salient positions
  (isolation, final position, and penultimate
  position followed by a pronoun) far more often
  than expected (81).

• Stimuli
• Six novel objects
• Six novel actions performed on the target
  objects
• Each target object and target action was
  assigned a novel label.
• The stimulus set is presented in Table 1, with
  examples of the
• objects in Figure 1.

Figure 2 Target Noun Presentations
Table 1 Target nouns and verbs
Figure 1 Examples of novel objects
Figure 3 Target Verb Presentations
Isolation 55

• Purpose
• These data come from a larger study of the role
  of syntactic category and phonology on word
  learning.
• The language used by the examiner during the
  presentation of novel words suggested that verbs,
  as well as nouns, might be perceptually salient.
  In this poster, we systematically investigated
  that possibility. We sought to
• Replicate previous work by confirming that nouns
  tend to occur in perceptually salient positions.
• Extend previous work by investigating whether
  verbs also occur in perceptually salient
  positions.
• How often do verbs occur in utterance-final
  position?
• If verbs occur in medial position, are they
  followed by a full noun phrase or just a pronoun?
  
• How often do verbs occur in isolation?

Followed by Pronoun 16
Bic
Wug
Vlad
Final Position 10

• Procedure
• Children visited the lab bimonthly for hour-long
  sessions
• In each session, the examiner
• presented each target object and labeled it six
  times with a novel target noun (TN)
• demonstrated each action and labeled it six times
  with a novel target verb (TV)
• The examiner was given no instructions concerning
  what syntactic frames to use the novel words in.

Medial Position 9
Initial Position 10

• Conclusion
• As expected, nouns almost always occurred in
  final position, a salient position that may
  facilitate word learning.
• Verbs also occurred in perceptually salient
  positions.
• Verbs were typically presented in isolation,
  final position and penultimate position followed
  by a pronoun.
• Despite the Subject-Verb-Object structure of
  English, verbs were rarely followed by full noun
  phrases.
• In the word learning study from which these data
  were gathered, children learned verbs as readily
  as nouns. We hypothesize that perceptual
  salience facilitated learning of both nouns and
  verbs.
• Our next step will be to code the language
  parents use with their children to analyze the
  perceptual salience of verbs in spontaneous
  speech.

• Coding
• We coded the syntactic frames in which the novel
  words occurred (e.g., Look at the bic was coded
  verb-preposition-TN).
• Syntactic categories used to describe the
  syntactic frames are presented in Table 2.
• For each session, we tallied the number of times
  a specific syntactic frame was used.

Table 2 Syntactic Categories

• Method
• Participants
• 12 Children
• 5 males and 7 females
• Participated from 12 to 30 months of age.