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Word learning patterns in toddlerhood reflect semantic categorical organization: converging evidence from 21 languages
Poster E19 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Xaiohui You1, Ze Fu1, Yue Liu2, Yanchao Bi1,3, Xi Yu1; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Sichuan Normal University, 3Chinese Institute for Brain Research
Introduction: Semantic knowledge in humans is organized into different categories (e.g., animals), permitting efficient processing of complex information in daily life. How children develop the semantic categories has been a research focus in recent years. Behavioral studies explicitly probing the knowledge of conceptual relationships in children reveal the awareness of the categorical relationships in preschoolers or older. By contrast, early sensitivity to diagnostic perceptual information (e.g., visual features) associated with the categorical information has been demonstrated in infants using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Therefore, it is still an open question as to whether the categorical information is encoded when children begin to develop conceptual knowledge, and to what extent this categorical sensitivity is universal across different languages. To address these questions, the current study examined the categorical effects reflected in the word learning behaviors of toddlers across 21 languages. Methods: The Wordbank dataset collects parental responses on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Here we examined children’s expressive vocabulary of four semantic categories that are reliably observed in adults, which are animals, body parts, scenes, and small manipulable artifacts. For each language, the learning curve of each word was calculated as the percentages of children who can speak this word at each month from 16 to 36 months of age. Pearson correlation was conducted between the learning curves of each word pair. Similarities in the learning curves of words of the same category (i.e., within-category similarity) and those of words from different categories (i.e., between-category similarity) were compared across all 21 languages. To ensure the observed categorical effects were not confounded with phonological properties of words, a validation analysis was carried out by including phonological similarity of each word pair (estimated using eSpeak) as a covariate. Results: Across 21 languages, similarities in word learning curves were significantly higher for word pairs of the same category compared to the between-category pairs for all four semantic categories (animals: t20 = 8.82, pFDR-corrected < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.92; body: t20 = 8.68, pFDR-corrected < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.89; scene: t20 = 8.41, pFDR-corrected < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 1.83; artifacts: t20 = 12.16, pFDR-corrected < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 2.65). Close examination of individual languages revealed the similar patterns (within-category similarity > between-category similarity), with significant results in all 21 languages for the scene category (pFDR-corrected < 0.05) and in 20 languages for the other three categories. Moreover, the same categorical effects could be replicated when controlling for the phonological similarity of word pairs. Summary: Our results revealed a consistent pattern in the word learning behavior of toddlers across 21 languages that the learning process of words in the same semantic category conforms to a specific learning curve that is distinctive from that in other categories. These universal category-specific patterns in word acquisition thus suggest the emergence of the categorical organizations during the initial conceptual development through vocabulary learning.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Language Development/Acquisition