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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
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Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language

Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
Components of Language01:24

Components of Language

Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs. “eh”). Phonemes combine to...
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The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is a cognitive experience characterized by a temporary inability to retrieve specific information from memory despite having a strong feeling of knowing the information. Although individuals cannot access the target word or detail, they frequently recall related elements, such as its initial letter, syllable count, or context. This partial retrieval often causes frustration, as one might recognize a familiar face or know that a name starts with a specific...
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The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to exist...

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Related Experiment Video

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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
06:34

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Published on: July 1, 2015

Word frequency as a cue for identifying function words in infancy.

Jean-Rémy Hochmann1, Ansgar D Endress, Jacques Mehler

  • 1SISSA, via Bonomea 265, Trieste TS, Italy. hochmann@sissa.it

Cognition
|March 27, 2010
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Seventeen-month-old infants can identify potential function words by recognizing their high frequency of occurrence. This study provides the first direct evidence of infants using distributional cues for function word acquisition.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Content words carry meaning, while function words serve grammatical roles.
  • Infants learning language must distinguish between these word types.
  • High frequency of occurrence is a language-universal cue.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 17-month-old infants can use word frequency to identify function word candidates.
  • To determine if infants associate frequent words with grammatical roles and infrequent words with meaning.
  • To explore the role of distributional cues in early word acquisition.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Infants were exposed to French sentences with high-frequency determiners.
  • Infants then participated in a visual-world paradigm associating objects with word pairs (determiner-noun).
  • Experiment 2: The procedure was repeated without initial sentence exposure to control for acoustic properties.

Main Results:

  • Infants in Experiment 1 associated objects more strongly with infrequent nouns than frequent determiners.
  • Infants in Experiment 2 showed no preferential association, indicating frequency was the key cue.
  • This suggests infants utilize distributional information to identify potential function words.

Conclusions:

  • Infants as young as 17 months can use the frequency of occurrence as a cue to identify potential function words.
  • This finding provides the first direct evidence for infants using distributional cues in function word identification.
  • This ability supports early language acquisition by helping infants parse grammatical structures.