International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: Multiple Cues in Language Learning, 2014-2019

It has long been claimed that the child’s experience of language is not sufficient to enable them to learn language, and so language structure must be innate and internal to the child. However, this traditional view depends on considering the child’s experience of language only in terms of the sequences of words that children hear. Yet, the language environment is rich, multimodal, noisy, and stimulating, going far beyond mere sequences of words. In this work package we investigated which sources of information in the child’s environment are available to support learning to identify words, determine their meaning, and their grammatical role in sentences. We also explored the contemporary influence of new media in adapting children’s experience of this language environment. Using a combination of computational modelling, corpus analysis of child-directed speech, experimental studies, and survey methods, we discovered that: The arrangement of sounds in words, the distribution of words in speech, the gesture of caregivers, and the presence and absence of objects and events around children each contributed to promote early stages of language learning. Combinations of cues were even more powerful in supporting learning than individual cues, and when these cues were variable, or noisy, this was optimal for language learning. Children’s ability to identify words in artificial speech related to their vocabulary development in the first two years of life, and the cues they relied on to identify words were the same as those used to identify the grammatical role of words in the language. At the point when language learners acquire their first words, they are already sensitive to the grammatical role of those words: vocabulary and grammar appear to be acquired simultaneously and early in language development. Use of new media (e.g., smartphones) is substantial in children’s preschool years, but children’s early language development was best predicted by their time spent co-reading with their caregivers, rather than the time spent on new media devices. Experimental studies: Study 1 with adults on whether intervening high-frequency function words can support segmentation of speech and contribute to categorisation of syntactic categories in language learning. Study 2 with infants testing whether intervening high-frequency function words support segmentation and syntax learning. Study 3 with infants testing whether children can segment and generalise structure of language at the same time from continuous artificial speech input. Study 6 with adults testing whether probabilistic multiple cues can support word-referent mappings. Study 7 with infants testing whether probabilistic multiple cues can support word-referent mappings. Study 8 with adults testing effect of sleep on learning to segment artificial speech and learning to generalise grammatical structure from the same speech. Study 9 Simultaneous segmentation and generalisation of non-adjacent dependencies from continuous speech. Study 10 with adults testing how referents for nouns and verbs can be learned under different instruction conditions. Study 11 with adults testing how referents for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammatical role marker words, and syntax, can be learned under different instruction conditions. Questionnaire study: Study 12: Questionnaire on children’s media use and relation to expressive and productive vocabulary. Meta-analysis review study: Study 5: Meta-analysis of studies testing conditions of learning of different grammatical structures across species. Computational modelling: Study 4: Computational model testing whether probabilistic multiple cues can support word-referent mappings.