Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood: Learning from Multiple Exemplars

✍ Scribed by Jane B. Childers (editor)

• Publisher: Springer
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 267
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book examines the role of experience-based learning on children’s acquisition of language and concepts. It reviews, compares, and contrasts accounts of how the opportunity to recognize and generalize patterns influences learning. The book offers the first systematic integration of three highly influential research traditions in the domains of language and concept acquisition: Statistical Learning, Structural Alignment, and the Bayesian learning perspective. Chapters examine the parameters that constrain learning, address conditions that optimize learning, and offer explanations for cases in which implicit exemplar-based learning fails to occur. By exploring both the benefits and challenges children face as they learn from multiple examples, the book offers insight on how to better able to understand children’s early unsupervised learning about language and concepts. 

Topics featured in this book include:

• Competing models of statistical learning and how learning might be constrained by infants’ developing cognitive abilities.
• How experience with multiple exemplars helps infants understand space and other relations.
• The emergence of category-based inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood.
• How children learn individual verbs and the verb system over time.  
• How statistical learning leads to aggregation and abstraction in word learning.
• Mechanisms for evaluating others’ reliability as sources of knowledge when learning new words.
• The Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis and its role in facilitating causal learning.

Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in infancy and early child development, applied linguistics, language education, child, school, and developmental psychology and related mental health and education services.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Contributors
About the Editor
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: Mechanisms of Statistical Learning in Infancy
Statistical Learning in Infancy
Kinds of Statistical Structure Infants Are Able to Learn
Testing Methods
Implications of Infant SL for Cognitive Development and Developmental Disabilities
Mechanisms Underlying Statistical Learning in Infancy
Conclusions and Broader Implications
References
Chapter 3: How Multiple Exemplars Matter for Infant Spatial Categorization
Why Spatial Relations?
Do Infants Require Multiple Exemplars for Forming Spatial Categories?
Procedures for Testing Infants’ Categorization of Spatial Relations
Does Infant Spatial Categorization Benefit from Multiple Examples?
What Mechanisms Are Central to Infant Spatial Categorization?
How Could the Other Theories in This Area Impact or Contribute to Your Findings?
Can Infant Spatial Categorization Inform Other Types of Spatial Learning?
References
Chapter 4: How the Demands of a Variable Environment Give Rise to Statistical Learning
Conditional Statistical Learning and Language Acquisition
Distributional Statistics
Representing Variability Across Exemplars
Encoding and Generalization in Memory
Memory and Statistical Learning
References
Chapter 5: Structure-Mapping Processes Enable Infants’ Learning Across Domains Including Language
When Is High Variability Helpful and When Not?
Promoting Relational Learning
What Paradigms Are Usually Used to Test Our Theory?
How Could Structure-Mapping Theory Extend Beyond Contexts?
Conclusions
References
Chapter 6: The Emergence of Inductive Reasoning During Infancy: Learning from Single and Multiple Exemplars
Inductive Reasoning During Early Childhood
Inductive Reasoning in Infancy
Developmental Origins of Inductive Reasoning
Unfamiliar Animal Categories
Familiar Animal Categories
Learning from One Versus Many: Integrating Findings Across Studies
Conclusions
References
Chapter 7: Learning Individual Verbs and the Verb System: When Are Multiple Examples Helpful?
Children’s Challenge in Acquiring the Lexical System of Verbs
Bootstrapping from Perceptual to Relational Similarity in Extracting the Core of Verb Meanings
Use of Multimodal Similarity (Iconicity)
Use of Object Similarity
Summary and Implications
An Additional Mechanism for Verb Learning: Contrast
Verb Meaning Acquisition Within the Constraints of the Lexical System
Complexity of the Semantic Structures in Lexical Domains in the Real World
What Do Children Need to Discover to Acquire Verbs in a Complex-Structured Lexical Domain?
Findings from the “Carry” Verb Acquisition Study
How Many Verb Types Did Children Know?
Does Children’s Representation of the Lexical Domain Stay the Same Between 3 and 7?
Reliance of Object Similarity to Structure the Semantic Domain
Factors Determining the Ease of Learning
Summary and Implications: Object Saliency, Similarity, and Contrast as Driving Forces for Structuring the Verb Lexicon
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Multiple Examples Support Children’s Word Learning: The Roles of Aggregation, Decontextualization, and Memory Dynamics
Statistical Learning
Multiple Examples Provide Support for Aggregation
Multiple Examples Provide Support for Abstraction and Decontextualization
Multiple Examples Provide Support for Retention and Memory
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Mechanisms for Evaluating Others’ Reliability When Learning Novel Words
Associative Origins of Selective Learning
Do More Sophisticated Mechanisms Underlie Children’s Social Learning: A Gaze Following Example
Questions Can Answer Questions About Mechanisms of Selective Word Learning
Concluding Thoughts: Beyond Selective Word Learning
References
Chapter 10: The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning
Positive Testing Strategy
PTS in Scientific Reasoning
PTS in Rule Learning
Theories of PTS
PTS as a Means of Generating Outcomes
PTS as a Means of Generating Evidence
Other Accounts and Overlapping Evidence
The Current Theory: Positive Testing and Causal Learning
Causal Invariance and Interventionism
The Search for Invariance (SI) Hypothesis
As an Alternative to “Engineering Desirable Outcomes”
As an Alternative to “Seeking Confirmatory Evidence”
Beyond Evidence of Sufficiency
As an Account of Previously Ambiguous Evidence
Conclusion: Relationship to Truth
References
Chapter 11: Multiple Exemplars of Relations
Exemplars of Relations—Unique Challenges
Why Is It Difficult to Perceive Multiple Exemplars of Relations?
Not Knowing the Relations
The Relations Are Known, but the Relational Similarity Is Not Salient
The Solution: Structural Alignment
Comparing What? Similarity of Exemplars
How Many Exemplars to Compare?
How Does Comparison Happen?
Object Similarity Invites Comparison
Progressive Alignment
Language Invites Comparison
Social Relational Learning
The Problem
Problem 1: Lack of Domain Knowledge
Problem 2: Relational Versus Object Matches
The Solution: How Does Structure Mapping Work in the Social Domain?
Language for Learning Relational Concepts
Does Object Similarity Help?
Social Comparison and Object Versus Relational Similarity
Alignable Differences
Summary
References
Chapter 12: Epilogue: Comparing Comparison Theories: What Can We Gain?
References
Index