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Conceptual precursors to language.

ABSTRACT: Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language; however, infants' sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year. Here we ask whether a similar process governs learning of word meanings. We investigated the sensitivity of 5-month-old infants in an English-speaking environment to a conceptual distinction that is marked in Korean but not English; that is, the distinction between 'tight' and 'loose' fit of one object to another. Like adult Korean speakers but unlike adult English speakers, these infants detected this distinction and divided a continuum of motion-into-contact actions into tight- and loose-fit categories. Infants' sensitivity to this distinction is linked to representations of object mechanics that are shared by non-human animals. Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning.

SUBMITTER: Hespos SJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1415221 | biostudies-literature | 2004 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Conceptual precursors to language.

Hespos Susan J SJ Spelke Elizabeth S ES

Nature 20040701 6998

Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language; however, infants' sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year. Here we ask whether a similar pr ...[more]

PMID: 15269769

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Project description:There is a growing body of research demonstrating that the cerebellum is involved in language understanding. Early theories assumed that the cerebellum is involved in low-level language processing. However, those theories are at odds with recent work demonstrating cerebellar activation during cognitive tasks. Using natural language stimuli and an encoding model framework, we performed an fMRI experiment on 3 men and 2 women, where subjects passively listened to 5 h of natural language stimuli, which allowed us to analyze language processing in the cerebellum with higher precision than previous work. We used these data to fit voxelwise encoding models with five different feature spaces that span the hierarchy of language processing from acoustic input to high-level conceptual processing. Examining the prediction performance of these models on separate BOLD data shows that cerebellar responses to language are almost entirely explained by high-level conceptual language features rather than low-level acoustic or phonemic features. Additionally, we found that the cerebellum has a higher proportion of voxels that represent social semantic categories, which include "social" and "people" words, and lower representations of all other semantic categories, including "mental," "concrete," and "place" words, than cortex. This suggests that the cerebellum is representing language at a conceptual level with a preference for social information.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Recent work has demonstrated that, beyond its typical role in motor planning, the cerebellum is implicated in a wide variety of tasks, including language. However, little is known about the language representations in the cerebellum, or how those representations compare to cortex. Using voxelwise encoding models and natural language fMRI data, we demonstrate here that language representations are significantly different in the cerebellum compared with cortex. Cerebellum language representations are almost entirely semantic, and the cerebellum contains overrepresentation of social semantic information compared with cortex. These results suggest that the cerebellum is not involved in language processing per se, but cognitive processing more generally.

Project description:BackgroundType-Token Ratio (TTR), given its relatively simple hand computation, is one of the few LSA measures calculated by clinicians in everyday practice. However, it has significant well-documented shortcomings; these include instability as a function of sample size, and absence of clear developmental profiles over early childhood. A variety of alternative measures of lexical diversity have been proposed; some, such as Number of Different Words/100 (NDW) can also be computed by hand. However, others, such as Vocabulary Diversity (VocD) and the Moving Average Type Token Ratio (MATTR) rely on complex resampling algorithms that cannot be conducted by hand. To date, no large-scale study of all four measures has evaluated how well any capture typical developmental trends over early childhood, or whether any reliably distinguish typical from atypical profiles of expressive child language ability.Materials and methodsWe conducted linear and non-linear regression analyses for TTR, NDW, VocD, and MATTR scores for samples taken from 946 corpora from typically developing preschool children (ages 2-6 years), engaged in adult-child toy play, from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). These were contrasted with 504 samples from children known to have delayed expressive language skills (total n = 1,454 samples). We also conducted a separate sub-analysis which examined possible contextual effects of sampling environment on lexical diversity.ResultsOnly VocD showed significantly different mean scores between the typically -developing children and delayed developing children group. Using TTR would actually misdiagnose typical children and miss children with known language impairment. However, computation of VocD as a function of toy interactions was significant and emerges as a further caution in use of lexical diversity as a valid proxy index of children's expressive vocabulary skill.DiscussionThis large scale statistical comparison of computer-implemented algorithms for expressive lexical profiles in young children with traditional, hand-calculated measures showed that only VocD met criteria for evidence-based use in LSA. However, VocD was impacted by sample elicitation context, suggesting that non-linguistic factors, such as engagement with elicitation props, contaminate estimates of spoken lexical skill in young children. Implications and suggested directions are discussed.

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Conceptual precursors to language.

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Conceptual precursors to language.

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