What determines children's production of syntactic alternations? This study takes up this question with the double PP construction in English as the test case (e.g., write [on the paper] [with this new pen]). Leveraging data of spontaneous child-parent interactions, we investigate the roles of dependency length and parent input frequency, with the latter being operationalized as lexical frequency and contextual predictability. We found that when child and parent data was combined, all three factors turned out to have significant predictive power, with dependency length having the most pronounced role. Results from the developmental trajectory of DLM as well as logistic regression analysis suggest that child production of constituent ordering preferences starts becoming more parent-like after the age of 30 months.


Double PP Constituent Ordering Preferences in English Early Child Language

Despite evidence that learners are storing a lot more than simple words, it is still unclear what determines whether a phrase is stored holistically. For example, storage could be driven by either phrasal frequency or by the mutual predictability of a phrase's component parts . Further, the processing consequences of holistic storage are also unclear. Given that sentence processing is incremental, how does recognition of individual words give rise to recognition of holistically stored phrases? The present study examines these questions. Specifically, participants are presented with sentences that contain compound nouns in locally plausible or locally implausible contexts. We examine whether participants are able to overcome local implausibility effects more easily if the compound nouns are highly predictable. We find that predictability does not overcome local implausibility effects, suggesting that either predictability is not driving holistic storage or that holistic storage driven by predictability does not facilitate comprehension in our task.


Does Predictability Drive the Holistic Storage of Compound Nouns?

This paper presents a challenge to enactivist approaches to cognition (e.g. Ward, D., Silverman, D. & Villalobos, M. 2017): how can enactivists integrate data and results from research methods used in developmental psychology and animal cognition studies that heavily rely on representations, given enactivism's aversion to representations? I discuss theoretical commitments behind forms of looking time studies that have been used to probe into the cognitive abilities of infants and animals, focusing on the Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm (Ginnobili & Olmos 2021), to illustrate why these methods might pose an especially difficult problem for enactivists and their re-interpretation of cognitive science in terms of dynamic coupling between organism and environment. I argue that despite the lack of clarity regarding how the notion of expectation should be applied to the minds of neonates and nonhuman animals, there is an inherently representational aspect to expectation, given that it embodies satisfaction conditions.


Expectation, Representation, and Enactivism

Languages seem to be designed for efficient communication. For example, shorter forms are used for more predictable meanings, a tendency argued to stem from speakers’ efficient language use. However, no study to date has systematically tested whether communicative efficiency shapes children’s language use. Investigating whether such a pressure is already present in children will shed light on the development of children’s’ communicative behaviour and the respective roles of adults and children in shaping language structure. Here, we investigate the development of communicative efficiency using a novel experimental paradigm with children ages 4-10. Results show that communicative efficiency is attested already in young children and becomes more adult-like with age: as children grow, they are more likely to shorten messages (minimize effort) when a short message is sufficient for accurate communication. We discuss the implications of our results for cognitive development and for theories of language evolution and change.

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

This study sought to determine if a child’s inventory of denominal verbs (e.g., swing as a verb) at 42 and 54 months are predicted by their inventory of related nouns (e.g., swing as a noun) at 30 months and whether these relationships are different for late talking and typically developing children. Keywords consisting of denominal verbs and related nouns were extracted from 42 late talking and 44 typically developing children at 30, 42, and 54 months. Preliminary results revealed that related noun inventories at 30 months predict denominal verb inventories at 42 months. However, related noun inventories at 30 months do not predict denominal verb inventories at 54 months. These results suggest that differences in noun inventories are linked to denominal verb inventories regardless of language status, but only in an early window of development.

Noun Today, Verb Tomorrow: Differences in the Expressive Noun Inventories of Late Talking and Typically Developing 30-Month-Olds Predicts Expressive Denominal Verb Inventories

ASD children are characterised by their refusal to change and difficulty in changing their responses to different social situations, which make it difficult for them to communicate with others, including their parents. We applied the comprehensive care technique Humanitude™ to mothers of children with ASD to support them from a multimodal communication perspective.
Changes in mother-child communication were analysed in terms of mother-child gaze and the time the mother and child spent playing together. The results indicate that after the Humanitude™ intervention, there were significant differences in eye contact, mothers looking at their children, and children looking at their mothers. There was also a significant decrease in time children spent playing alone. There was a high correlation between pre and post-Humanitude™ intervention in the amount of time both mothers and children spent looking at each other, which suggests that incorporating multimodal communication can affect communication between parents and children.

Behavioural changes in the interaction between child with autism spectrum disorder and mother through the Comprehensive Care Humanitude™ intervention

The link between language and cognition is evident in the first months of life. As early as three months of age, a parent labeling an object that the infant is looking at, influences the infants’ thoughts about those objects (Ferry et al., 2010). Prior research investigating this question has been conducted using face-to-face methodologies (Fulkerson & Waxman, 2007). Due to COVID, we sought to validate an online counterpart of the categorization task using preferential-looking paradigms. In Experiment 1, we found that language labels facilitated object categorization for 10- to 12-month-old infants. In contrast, a control condition that presented the same labeling phrases played in reverse did not facilitate categorization. In Experiment 2, we found that labels did not facilitate object categorization among 6-month-old infants. In sum, the advantage of online infant testing may be restricted to older ages.

Mixed results testing categorization in infants using a preferential-looking paradigm on Zoom

Verb learning is a difficult, important task for young learners (e.g., Childers & Tomasello, 2002). Children often see different events while hearing new verbs and have to deduce which event is relevant for learning that verb’s meaning. We simulated this experience by showing 3 ½- and 4 ½-year-olds (n= 28) 3 events on each trial and presenting a new verb. Across 3 trials, 4-year-olds were able to focus on the repeated action and extend the verb (p=.02); 3-year-olds performed at chance. In Study 2, the same-aged children (n=26 to date) were shown a repeated agent across trials (facilitating structural alignment), six learning trials (more instances for statistical learning), or both a repeated agent and six learning trials. Analyses of the first two conditions suggest a difference between conditions (p<.10); data collection in progress. These studies are important for understanding cognitive processes that may underlie a key task, verb learning.

The Key is Comparison: How Children Learn Verbs When Confronted with Referential Ambiguity

By 24 months, toddlers can process language incrementally using phonology to disambiguate lexical candidates. Adult research shows incremental processing of word meaning; however, this aspect is unclear in research with toddlers. Thus, we investigated the effect of phonological and semantic competition on word recognition in 18- and 24-month-old toddlers. In a preferential-looking task, toddlers looked at semantic-related (taxonomic or thematic) or unrelated pairs of pictures with different or similar phonological onset. The results showed that the 18-month group looked at the target only when the onset of both pictures was different but not when they were similar -regardless of the type of relationship. By contrast, the 24-month group had a similar look pattern as the 18-month group, only in semantically related but not in unrelated pairs. This research suggests that at 24 months of age, toddlers can interpret language incrementally based on phonological and semantic representations.

The Effects of Phonological and Semantic Similarity on Early Word Recognition

Language input is potentially ambiguous in a number of ways. In order to process language effectively, language users need to resolve these ambiguities quickly and efficiently. Many sources of information are recruited to complete this process including contextual constraints, prosody, and verb biases. The current work focuses on the development of verb biases given children’s overreliance on them. To explore this issue, I examined the effect of syntactic priming on the interpretation of PP-attachment ambiguities by 5-year-old children. Three priming experiments utilized three different but related prime types: globally ambiguous PP-attachments, unambiguous attachments disambiguated by syntax, and unambiguous attachments disambiguated by pragmatics. Results demonstrated priming in all three experiments, although it was strongest when the primes themselves were ambiguous. This finding provides further evidence for comprehension priming in children, and suggests that their verb biases can be overcome given the appropriate resources.

Priming Children's Interpretation of Globally Ambiguous Sentences

Spatial navigation is supported by the combined activity of brain regions in the human navigation network (HNN) that integrates environmental information across complementary egocentric and allocentric reference frames. Despite humans mainly relying on vision to navigate space, the impact of early visual deprivation on the HNN is mostly unknown. In our experiment sighted and early blind participants were tested in two tasks of imagined navigation while undergoing fMRI. Results show, on the one hand, that both sighted and blind activated regions of the HNN during navigation, with no differences between groups. On the other hand, quadrature filter analysis in the entorhinal cortex, a crucial region for the creation of cognitive maps, revealed an alteration of grid-like coding in early blind individuals, which might be correlated to the adoption of egocentric-like strategies to navigate in space.

Altered grid-like coding in early blind people during imagined navigation

Infants must balance interacting with a caregiver and navigating the environment, driven by their curiosity and attachment. This decision involves trading off proximity seeking with the caregiver and novelty seeking in the surroundings. Our hypothesis is that different attachment styles may arise as adaptive reward-seeking strategies based on different frequencies and scales of rewards from both caregiver and environment, including negative rewards due to distressing encounters. We implement a computational model using a reinforcement learning framework to model infants’ attachment and exploratory behaviors as a bandit problem. We study how infants’ exploratory behaviors emerge as they learn from their caregiver and how these learned behaviors transfer to a new caregiver. Our work expands upon existing computational models of attachment and models how social factors can influence curiosity-seeking as infants learn to explore versus exploit.

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Double PP Constituent Ordering Preferences in English Early Child Language

Does Predictability Drive the Holistic Storage of Compound Nouns?

Expectation, Representation, and Enactivism

Communicative efficiency is present in young children and becomes more adult-like with age

Noun Today, Verb Tomorrow: Differences in the Expressive Noun Inventories of Late Talking and Typically Developing 30-Month-Olds Predicts Expressive Denominal Verb Inventories

Behavioural changes in the interaction between child with autism spectrum disorder and mother through the Comprehensive Care Humanitude™ intervention

Mixed results testing categorization in infants using a preferential-looking paradigm on Zoom

The Key is Comparison: How Children Learn Verbs When Confronted with Referential Ambiguity

The Effects of Phonological and Semantic Similarity on Early Word Recognition

Priming Children's Interpretation of Globally Ambiguous Sentences

Altered grid-like coding in early blind people during imagined navigation

Reinforcement learning models of tradeoffs between infant attachment and curiosity

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