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Children's understanding of speaker reliability between lexical and syntactic knowledge
David M Sobel1, Deanna M Macris
1CLPS Department, Box 1821, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. Dave_Sobel@brown.edu
Developmental Psychology
|August 15, 2012
Summary
Preschoolers use a speaker's accuracy in one language area, like vocabulary, to judge their reliability for learning new words. This ability develops with age, influencing how children learn syntax and word forms.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Preschoolers often learn new words by observing a speaker's past accuracy.
- Previous research focused on lexical accuracy, but the influence of syntactic accuracy is less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if children infer a speaker's general linguistic reliability across different knowledge types (lexicon and syntax).
- To examine how speaker accuracy influences the learning of novel words and grammatical structures in preschoolers.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Children observed two speakers differing in subject-verb agreement accuracy while being lexically accurate.
- Experiment 2: Children observed two speakers differing in lexical accuracy while being syntactically accurate.
- Children's learning of novel labels, irregular plurals, and irregular past tense forms was assessed.
Main Results:
- Older preschoolers (but not younger ones) used a lexically accurate speaker's reliability to learn new labels (Experiment 1).
- All 4-year-olds used speaker accuracy to learn novel words and irregular plurals, but not regularized irregular past tense forms (Experiment 2).
- Reliability judgments appear to interact with linguistic regularity during learning.
Conclusions:
- Preschoolers' ability to generalize speaker reliability across linguistic domains develops with age.
- Children's learning of novel syntactic information is influenced by perceived speaker reliability and the inherent regularity of linguistic forms.
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