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Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning

How words are associated within the linguistic environment conveys semantic content; however, different contexts induce different linguistic patterns. For instance, it is well known that adults speak differently to children than to other adults. We present results from a new word association study i...

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Autores principales: Cox, Christopher R., Haebig, Eileen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9918578/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35254630
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01790-y
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author Cox, Christopher R.
Haebig, Eileen
author_facet Cox, Christopher R.
Haebig, Eileen
author_sort Cox, Christopher R.
collection PubMed
description How words are associated within the linguistic environment conveys semantic content; however, different contexts induce different linguistic patterns. For instance, it is well known that adults speak differently to children than to other adults. We present results from a new word association study in which adult participants were instructed to produce either unconstrained or child-oriented responses to each cue, where cues included 672 nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other word forms from the McArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 2006). Child-oriented responses consisted of higher frequency words with fewer letters, earlier ages of acquisition, and higher contextual diversity. Furthermore, the correlations among the responses generated for each pair of cues differed between unconstrained (adult-oriented) and child-oriented responses, suggesting that child-oriented associations imply different semantic structure. A comparison of growth models guided by a semantic network structure revealed that child-oriented associations are more predictive of early lexical growth. Additionally, relative to a growth model based on a corpus of naturalistic child-directed speech, the child-oriented associations explain added unique variance to lexical growth. Thus, these new child-oriented word association norms provide novel insight into the semantic context of young children and early lexical development.
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spelling pubmed-99185782023-02-12 Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning Cox, Christopher R. Haebig, Eileen Behav Res Methods Article How words are associated within the linguistic environment conveys semantic content; however, different contexts induce different linguistic patterns. For instance, it is well known that adults speak differently to children than to other adults. We present results from a new word association study in which adult participants were instructed to produce either unconstrained or child-oriented responses to each cue, where cues included 672 nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other word forms from the McArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 2006). Child-oriented responses consisted of higher frequency words with fewer letters, earlier ages of acquisition, and higher contextual diversity. Furthermore, the correlations among the responses generated for each pair of cues differed between unconstrained (adult-oriented) and child-oriented responses, suggesting that child-oriented associations imply different semantic structure. A comparison of growth models guided by a semantic network structure revealed that child-oriented associations are more predictive of early lexical growth. Additionally, relative to a growth model based on a corpus of naturalistic child-directed speech, the child-oriented associations explain added unique variance to lexical growth. Thus, these new child-oriented word association norms provide novel insight into the semantic context of young children and early lexical development. Springer US 2022-03-07 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9918578/ /pubmed/35254630 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01790-y Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Cox, Christopher R.
Haebig, Eileen
Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title_full Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title_fullStr Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title_full_unstemmed Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title_short Child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
title_sort child-oriented word associations improve models of early word learning
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9918578/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35254630
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01790-y
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