The goal of this project is to understand how children (and older second-language learners) discover the meanings of words and their semantic roles in sentences. Even for simple words like """"""""dog"""""""" it is not easy to glean what they mean from observing (as one usually will) that there is a dog in sight. For after all, when a dog is in sight so is his fur, and his ear, and the joyous wagging of his tail. To which of these factors or propertie does the pointing finger refer when an adult says """"""""Look at that doggie!"""""""" Things get even harder when the child has to learn the meanings of words like """"""""idea"""""""" or """"""""think"""""""" because in these cases there's nothing so obvious to point to out there in the world. Yet children of three and four year olds understand and utter such apparently """"""""abstract"""""""" words. Our projects take off from the observation that not all words occur in the same places in sentences, for instance one can say """"""""I think (or see) that you're cute"""""""" but not """"""""I jump that you're cute."""""""" Strikingly, children as young a two- and three-year olds are sensitive to these """"""""positional privileges,"""""""" which in turn give clues t word meaning. Because it is hard to get information about children's word meanings or their learning by asking them for definitions or the like, we use implicit methods such as tracking children's eye gaze direction and responsiveness to queries that place words into different visuo-social environments and into different syntactic structures to find out about their evolving word knowledge. These issues are of much more than academic interest. No tested property of child cognition or behavior is a better predictor of school and work-place success than vocabulary growth in the first few years of life. Vocabulary scores diverge for children of higher or lower socio-economic status as early as the second birthday, and these differences increase throughout the school years, influencing all the child's subsequent learning. So our work extends to discovering ways that actual home and early school environments can maximize the supportive environment for vocabulary and syntax acquisition. Our past work gives strong indications of what these favorable learning environments are, and the present application inquires more deeply into these factors.
The ability to speak and understand language fluently is a basic requirement for economic and social well- being in 21st Century American life. Yet language skills are unequally distributed across the citizenry with differences appearing before the second birthday and persisting through school years. Our findings, pertaining particularly to the growth of vocabulary, are uncovering the properties that foster high vocabulary attainment.
| Stevens, Jon Scott; Gleitman, Lila R; Trueswell, John C et al. (2017) The Pursuit of Word Meanings. Cogn Sci 41 Suppl 4:638-676 |
| Pozzan, Lucia; Trueswell, John C (2016) Second language processing and revision of garden-path sentences: a visual word study. Biling (Camb Engl) 19:636-643 |
| Trueswell, John C; Lin, Yi; Armstrong 3rd, Benjamin et al. (2016) Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent-child interactions. Cognition 148:117-35 |
| Woodard, Kristina; Pozzan, Lucia; Trueswell, John C (2016) Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. J Exp Child Psychol 141:187-209 |
| Pozzan, Lucia; Gleitman, Lila R; Trueswell, John C (2016) Semantic ambiguity and syntactic bootstrapping: The case of conjoined-subject intransitive sentences. Lang Learn Dev 12:14-41 |
| Woodard, Kristina; Gleitman, Lila R; Trueswell, John C (2016) Two- and three-year-olds track a single meaning during word learning: Evidence for Propose-but-verify. Lang Learn Dev 12:252-261 |
| Pozzan, Lucia; Trueswell, John C (2015) Revise and resubmit: how real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition. Cogn Psychol 80:73-108 |
| Cartmill, Erica A; Armstrong 3rd, Benjamin F; Gleitman, Lila R et al. (2013) Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:11278-83 |
| Trueswell, John C; Medina, Tamara Nicol; Hafri, Alon et al. (2013) Propose but verify: fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning. Cogn Psychol 66:126-56 |
| Sekerina, Irina A; Trueswell, John C (2012) Interactive processing of contrastive expressions by Russian children. First Lang 32:63-87 |
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