Predicting the birth of a spoken word
Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
2017
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110579 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4333-7194 |
| _version_ | 1826194168715673600 |
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| author | Frank, Michael C. Roy, Brandon Cain DeCamp, Philip J Miller, Matthew Adam Roy, Deb K |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Frank, Michael C. Roy, Brandon Cain DeCamp, Philip J Miller, Matthew Adam Roy, Deb K |
| author_sort | Frank, Michael C. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:52:00Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/110579 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:52:00Z |
| publishDate | 2017 |
| publisher | National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1105792022-09-26T14:12:31Z Predicting the birth of a spoken word Frank, Michael C. Roy, Brandon Cain DeCamp, Philip J Miller, Matthew Adam Roy, Deb K Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Roy, Brandon Cain DeCamp, Philip J Miller, Matthew Adam Roy, Deb K Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition. 2017-07-10T14:50:03Z 2017-07-10T14:50:03Z 2015-09 2014-10 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0027-8424 1091-6490 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110579 Roy, Brandon C.; Frank, Michael C.; DeCamp, Philip; Miller, Matthew and Roy, Deb. “Predicting the Birth of a Spoken Word.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 41 (September 2015): 12663–12668 © 2015 Roy et al. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4333-7194 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419773112 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) PNAS |
| spellingShingle | Frank, Michael C. Roy, Brandon Cain DeCamp, Philip J Miller, Matthew Adam Roy, Deb K Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title | Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title_full | Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title_fullStr | Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title_full_unstemmed | Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title_short | Predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| title_sort | predicting the birth of a spoken word |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110579 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4333-7194 |
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