TY - GEN
T1 - Lexical Complexity of Child-Directed and Overheard Speech
T2 - 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016
AU - Foushee, Ruthe
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Srinivasan, Mahesh
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Although previous studies have found a link between the quantity and quality of child-directed speech learners receive and their vocabulary development, no previous studies have found a parallel link between overheard speech measured at a very young age and vocabulary development (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Shneidman, Arroyo, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This is despite the fact that children are able to learn words from overheard speech in laboratory settings (Shneidman & Woodward, 2015). Drawing on the idea that children preferentially attend to stimuli that are at a manageable level of complexity (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012, 2014), the present research explores the possibility that children do not initially tune into overheard speech because it is initially too complex for their stage of lexical development (i.e., contains too great a proportion of unfamiliar words). Using transcripts from CHILDES and the Santa Barbara Corpus, and estimates of vocabulary by age from the MB-CDI, we find that child-directed speech is significantly less complex than overheard speech through at least 30 months. If attention based on complexity at least partially accounts for the statistical independence of overheard speech and vocabulary development in early childhood, then children might only begin learning from more complex, overheard speech sometime after 30 months.
AB - Although previous studies have found a link between the quantity and quality of child-directed speech learners receive and their vocabulary development, no previous studies have found a parallel link between overheard speech measured at a very young age and vocabulary development (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Shneidman, Arroyo, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This is despite the fact that children are able to learn words from overheard speech in laboratory settings (Shneidman & Woodward, 2015). Drawing on the idea that children preferentially attend to stimuli that are at a manageable level of complexity (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012, 2014), the present research explores the possibility that children do not initially tune into overheard speech because it is initially too complex for their stage of lexical development (i.e., contains too great a proportion of unfamiliar words). Using transcripts from CHILDES and the Santa Barbara Corpus, and estimates of vocabulary by age from the MB-CDI, we find that child-directed speech is significantly less complex than overheard speech through at least 30 months. If attention based on complexity at least partially accounts for the statistical independence of overheard speech and vocabulary development in early childhood, then children might only begin learning from more complex, overheard speech sometime after 30 months.
KW - attention
KW - corpus analysis
KW - lexical development
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85117129600
T3 - Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016
SP - 1697
EP - 1702
BT - Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016
A2 - Papafragou, Anna
A2 - Grodner, Daniel
A2 - Mirman, Daniel
A2 - Trueswell, John C.
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 10 August 2016 through 13 August 2016
ER -