Learning your language, outside-in and inside-out

Abstract Children learn how to learn language, and they get better as they go along. This article presents an overview of research inspired by a dynamic systems view of language learning that shows it to be a self-organizing process in which children create the units they need from the regularities present in the environment in which they are situated.

[1]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Pronouns Predict Verb Meanings in Child-Directed Speech , 2004 .

[2]  Michael P. Kaschak,et al.  Grounding language in action , 2002, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[3]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Grounding development in cognitive processes. , 2000, Child development.

[4]  Christopher W. Robinson,et al.  Auditory dominance and its change in the course of development. , 2004, Child development.

[5]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Linguistic Cues Enhance the Learning of Perceptual Cues , 2005, Psychological science.

[6]  J. Morgan,et al.  SIGNAL TO SYNTAX : Bootstrapping From Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition , 2008 .

[7]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Different is good: connectionism and dynamic systems theory are complementary emergentist approaches to development , 2003 .

[8]  Jane B. Childers,et al.  The role of pronouns in young children's acquisition of the English transitive construction. , 2001, Developmental psychology.

[9]  L. Frank.  The Society for Research in Child Development , 1935 .

[10]  Jessica Maye,et al.  Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination , 2002, Cognition.

[11]  S. Hockema,et al.  Eye Scanpaths Influence Memory for Spoken Verbs , 2004 .

[12]  L. Gogate,et al.  The intersensory origins of word‐comprehension: an ecological–dynamic systems view , 2001 .

[13]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  A construction based analysis of child directed speech , 2003, Cogn. Sci..

[14]  Chen Yu,et al.  A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues , 2007, Neurocomputing.

[15]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach , 2004 .

[16]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children , 2002, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  J. Saffran.  Statistical Language Learning , 2003 .

[18]  C. Fisher,et al.  Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: cross-linguistic evidence. , 1996, Child development.

[19]  Roberta Michnick Golinkoff,et al.  Becoming a word learner : a debate on lexical acquisition , 2000 .

[20]  A. Clark.  Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again , 1996 .

[21]  Kathleen Ahrens,et al.  Verbal Integration: The Interaction of Participant Roles and Sentential Argument Structure , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[22]  Noam Chomsky.  Knowledge of language: its nature, origin, and use , 1988 .

[23]  E. Hutchins.  Cognition in the wild , 1995 .

[24]  Letitia R. Naigles,et al.  Children use syntax to learn verb meanings , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[25]  D. Gentner.  Spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning , 2001 .

[26]  E. Newport,et al.  Computation of Conditional Probability Statistics by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1998 .

[27]  S. Levinson.  Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity , 2003 .

[28]  T. Sejnowski,et al.  Irresistible environment meets immovable neurons , 1997, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[29]  E. Newport,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article INCIDENTAL LANGUAGE LEARNING: Ustening (and Learning) out of the Comer of Your Ear , 2022 .

[30]  D. Lewkowicz,et al.  A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. , 2007, Journal of cognitive neuroscience.

[31]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[32]  Larissa K. Samuelson,et al.  Statistical regularities in vocabulary guide language acquisition in connectionist models and 15-20-month-olds. , 2002, Developmental psychology.

[33]  L. Boroditsky,et al.  Do we think about time in terms of space , 2003 .

[34]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Shifting ontological boundaries: how Japanese‐ and English‐speaking children generalize names for animals and artifacts , 2003 .

[35]  M. Studdert-Kennedy.  Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. , 1994 .

[36]  N. Sebastián-Gallés,et al.  Simultaneous Bilingualism and the Perception of a Language-Specific Vowel Contrast in the First Year of Life , 2003, Language and speech.

[37]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Visual statistical learning in infancy: evidence for a domain general learning mechanism , 2002, Cognition.

[38]  Nick Chater,et al.  Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic Categories , 1998, Cogn. Sci..

[39]  W. Chafe.  Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing , 1996 .

[40]  M. Maratsos,et al.  The internal language of children's syntax : The ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories , 1980 .

[41]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  Representation, space and Hollywood Squares: looking at things that aren't there anymore , 2000, Cognition.

[42]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind: Language as a natural object , 2000 .

[43]  Ping Li.  The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect in Self-Organizing Feature-Map Model , 2000 .

[44]  Linda B Smith,et al.  Learning Words in Space and Time , 2011, Psychological science.

[45]  Y. Marignac,et al.  Note , 1951, Neurochemistry International.

[46]  Axel Cleeremans,et al.  Implicit learning: news from the front , 1998, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[47]  Rajesh P. N. Rao,et al.  Embodiment is the foundation, not a level , 1996, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[48]  Jessica Maye,et al.  Statistical Cues Facilitate Infants ’ Discrimination of Difficult Phonetic Contrasts , 2002 .

[49]  M. R. Brent,et al.  Surface cues and robust inference as a basis for the early acquisition of subcategorization frames , 1994 .

[50]  P. Bloom.  How children learn the meanings of words , 2000 .

[51]  Robert L. Goldstone,et al.  Group path formation , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[52]  Peter W. Foltz,et al.  Learning Human-like Knowledge by Singular Value Decomposition: A Progress Report , 1997, NIPS.

[53]  David H. Uttal,et al.  Statistical Language Learning: Mechanisms and Constraints Learning the Sounds of Words Statistical Learning and Syntax , 2022 .

[54]  Joanne L. Miller,et al.  Speech Perception , 1990, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research.

[55]  L. Vygotsky,et al.  Thought and Language , 1963 .

[56]  Julian M. Pine,et al.  Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. , 2004 .

[57]  Curt Burgess,et al.  The Dynamics of Meaning in Memory , 1998 .

[58]  Stephen A. Hockema,et al.  Finding Words in Speech: An Investigation of American English , 2006 .

[59]  R. Gómez,et al.  Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[60]  Michael J. Spivey,et al.  Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: eye movements to absent objects , 2001, Psychological research.

[61]  Eric Brill,et al.  Discovering the Lexical Features of a Language , 1991, ACL.

[62]  C. Best,et al.  Examination of perceptual reorganization for nonnative speech contrasts: Zulu click discrimination by English-speaking adults and infants. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[63]  B. Heine,et al.  From cognition to grammar: Evidence from African languages , 1991 .

[64]  P. L. Adams.  THE ORIGINS OF INTELLIGENCE IN CHILDREN , 1976 .

[65]  D. Slobin.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition , 1987 .

[66]  Arthur M. Glenberg,et al.  Indexical understanding of instructions , 1999 .

[67]  G. Hitch,et al.  Phonological short-term memory and vocabulary development: Further evidence on the nature of the relationship. , 1999 .

[68]  E. Thelen,et al.  Hand, mouth and brain. The dynamic emergence of speech and gesture , 1999 .

[69]  Thomas L. Griffiths,et al.  Integrating Topics and Syntax , 2004, NIPS.

[70]  D. Laplane.  Thought and language. , 1992, Behavioural neurology.

[71]  L. Boroditsky.  Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time , 2001, Cognitive Psychology.

[72]  Cynthia Fisher,et al.  On the semantic content of subcategorization frames , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[73]  R. Diehl,et al.  Speech Perception , 2004, Annual review of psychology.

[74]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Finding Structure in Time , 1990, Cogn. Sci..

[75]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Prosody and the word boundary problem , 1996 .

[76]  Lois Bloom,et al.  The Transition from Infancy to Language , 1993 .

[77]  Teenie Matlock,et al.  On the Experiential Link Between Spatial and Temporal Language , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[78]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  Distributional Regularities of Form Class in Speech to Young Childre , 1995 .

[79]  Katherine S. White,et al.  A Statistical Basis for Speech Sound Discrimination , 2003, Language and speech.

[80]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[81]  Hinrich Schütze,et al.  Word Space , 1992, NIPS.

[82]  J. Werker,et al.  Developmental aspects of cross-language speech perception. , 1981, Child development.

[83]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[84]  S. Trehub.  The Discrimination of Foreign Speech Contrasts by Infants and Adults. , 1976 .

[85]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  From the lexicon to expectations about kinds: a role for associative learning. , 2005, Psychological review.

[86]  T. A. Cartwright,et al.  Syntactic categorization in early language acquisition: formalizing the role of distributional analysis , 1997, Cognition.

[87]  J. Werker,et al.  Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life , 1984 .

[88]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference. , 1991, Child development.

[89]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Early noun vocabularies: do ontology, category structure and syntax correspond? , 1999, Cognition.

[90]  R. Shillcock,et al.  Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 1998 .

[91]  J. Elman.  Generalization , simple recurrent networks , and the emergence of structure , 1998 .

[92]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Pronouns and verbs in adult speech to children: A corpus analysis* , 2007, Journal of Child Language.

[93]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Object name Learning Provides On-the-Job Training for Attention , 2002, Psychological science.

[94]  Rebecca J. Brand,et al.  Breaking the language barrier: an emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning. , 2000, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[95]  Letitia R. Naigles,et al.  The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping , 1996, Cognition.

[96]  E. Markman,et al.  Rapid Word Learning in 13- and 18-Month-Olds. , 1994 .

[97]  Linda B Smith,et al.  Early noun lexicons in English and Japanese , 2001, Cognition.

[98]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Development as a dynamic system , 1992, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[99]  L. S. Vygotskiĭ,et al.  Mind in society : the development of higher psychological processes , 1978 .

[100]  Chen Yu,et al.  The Role of Embodied Intention in Early Lexical Acquisition , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[101]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs , 2003, Cogn. Sci..

[102]  S. Kunihira,et al.  Effects of the expressive voice on phonetic symbolism , 1971 .

[103]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children , 1991, Cognition.

[104]  Jodie M. Plumert,et al.  The stability and flexibility of spatial categories , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.