Dataset Information

Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis.

ABSTRACT: Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two word segmentation tasks, varying in complexity, were administered in infancy and related to childhood outcome measures. Outcome measures consisted of age-normed productive vocabulary percentiles and a measure of cognitive development. Results demonstrated a strong degree of association between infant word segmentation abilities at 7 months and productive vocabulary size at 24 months. In addition, outcome groups, as defined by median vocabulary size and growth trajectories at 24 months, showed distinct word segmentation abilities as infants. These findings provide the first prospective evidence supporting the predictive validity of infant word segmentation tasks and suggest that they are indeed associated with mature word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxzLi5oLZQ8.

SUBMITTER: Singh L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3383643 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis.

Singh Leher L Steven Reznick J J Xuehua Liang L

Developmental science 20120223 4

Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two ...[more]

PMID: 22709398

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Project description:BackgroundThe fact that medical terms require special expertise and are becoming increasingly complex makes it difficult to employ natural language processing techniques in medical informatics. Several human-validated reference standards for medical terms have been developed to evaluate word embedding models using the semantic similarity and relatedness of medical word pairs. However, there are very few reference standards in non-English languages. In addition, because the existing reference standards were developed a long time ago, there is a need to develop an updated standard to represent recent findings in medical sciences.ObjectiveWe propose a new Korean word pair reference set to verify embedding models.MethodsFrom January 2010 to December 2020, 518 medical textbooks, 72,844 health information news, and 15,698 medical research articles were collected, and the top 10,000 medical terms were selected to develop medical word pairs. Attending physicians (n=16) participated in the verification of the developed set with 607 word pairs.ResultsThe proportion of word pairs answered by all participants was 90.8% (551/607) for the similarity task and 86.5% (525/605) for the relatedness task. The similarity and relatedness of the word pair showed a high correlation (ρ=0.70, P<.001). The intraclass correlation coefficients to assess the interrater agreements of the word pair sets were 0.47 on the similarity task and 0.53 on the relatedness task. The final reference standard was 604 word pairs for the similarity task and 599 word pairs for relatedness, excluding word pairs with answers corresponding to outliers and word pairs that were answered by less than 50% of all the respondents. When FastText models were applied to the final reference standard word pair sets, the embedding models learning medical documents had a higher correlation between the calculated cosine similarity scores compared to human-judged similarity and relatedness scores (namu, ρ=0.12 vs with medical text for the similarity task, ρ=0.47; namu, ρ=0.02 vs with medical text for the relatedness task, ρ=0.30).ConclusionsKorean medical word pair reference standard sets for semantic similarity and relatedness were developed based on medical documents from the past 10 years. It is expected that our word pair reference sets will be actively utilized in the development of medical and multilingual natural language processing technology in the future.

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Dataset Information

Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis.

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Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis.

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