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Others' emotional expressions affect individuals' attention allocation in social interactions, which are integral to the process of word learning. However, the impact of perceived emotions on word learning is not well understood. Two eye-tracking experiments investigated 78 British toddlers' (37 girls) of 29- to 31-month-old retention of novel label-object and emotion-object associations after hearing labels presented in neutral, positive, and negative affect in a referent selection task. Overall, toddlers learned novel label-object associations regardless of the affect associated with objects but showed an attentional bias toward negative objects especially when emotional cues were presented (d = 0.95), suggesting that identifying the referent to a label is a competitive process between retrieval of the learned label-object association and the emotional valence of distractors.

In January 2021, we published an article titled 'Predictive Processing and Developmental Language Disorder' in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. The current commentary provides an important extension to this work. Specifically, we aim to head off the suggestion that a child's 'predictive capacity' may be trained independently of improving the quality of their long-term speech representations., In January 2021, we published an article entitled 'Predictive Processing and Developmental Language Disorder' in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (S. D. Jones & Westermann, 2021). In [...]

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We evaluate behavioral and neurophysiological data relevant to the theme of prediction in early typical and atypical language acquisition and processing. Results: Poor syntactic awareness--attributable, in part, to an underlying statistical learning deficit--is likely to impede syntax-based predictive processing in children with DLD, conferring deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. Furthermore, there may be a feedback cycle in which poor syntactic awareness impedes children's ability to anticipate upcoming percepts, and this, in turn, makes children unable to improve their syntactic awareness on the basis of prediction error signals. Conclusion: This article offers a refocusing of theory on sentence processing and comprehension deficits in DLD, from a difficulty in processing and integrating perceived syntactic features to a difficulty in anticipating what is coming next.

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre-verbal and pre-pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12-month-olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non-Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice--locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty--but not at other phases of the procedure--infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non-Informant. These results show that pre-verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit.

Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, "Developmental Science," 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.

Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four‐ to 7‐year‐old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching‐like contexts. Although 2‐year‐old children are able to distinguish between generalizable and non‐generalizable information, it is not known whether they likewise transmit generalizable information selectively. We designed a behavioral study to address this question. Two‐year‐old children were presented with three novel boxes, identical except for their color. In each box, one of two equally salient actions led to a generalizable outcome (e.g., playing a [different] tune in each box), whereas the other led to a non‐generalizable outcome (e.g., turning on a light, vibrating the box, or making a noise). In the discovery phase, children had a chance to discover the functions of each box presented one‐by‐one. Then, in the exploration phase, they were given the opportunity to independently explore all three boxes presented together. Finally, in the transmission phase, an ignorant recipient entered the room and asked the child to show them how these toys work. We measured whether children preferentially transmitted either generalizable or non‐generalizable information when they were asked to demonstrate the function of the toys to a naïve adult. We found that children did not display any preference for transmitting generalizable information. These findings are discussed with respect to toddlers' selectivity in transmitting information but also the development of sensitivity to information generalizability. Research Highlight: Young children transmit information to others and do so with some degree of selectivity to a variety of factors.Generalizability is an important factor affecting information transmission, and older children tend to associate generalizable information with teaching‐like interactions.We tested whether toddlers selectively transmitted it to others over non‐generalizable information.We found that toddlers do not show a preference to transmit generalizable over non‐generalizable information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants' word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the corresponding categories. In Experiment 1, infants showed successful learning of the word-object associations, when trained and tested with a single exemplar from each category. In Experiment 2, infants were presented with multiple within-category items during training but failed to learn the word-object associations. In Experiment 3, infants were presented with a single exemplar from each category during training, and failed to generalize words to a new category exemplar. However, when infants were trained with items from perceptually and conceptually distinct categories in Experiment 4, they showed weak evidence for generalization of words to novel members of the corresponding categories. It is suggested that word learning in the first year begins as the formation of simple associations between words and objects that become enriched as experience with objects, words and categories accumulates across development.

Research on lexical development in Down syndrome (DS) hasemphasized a dissociation between language comprehensionand production abilities, with production of words beingrelatively more impaired than comprehension. Currenttheories stress the role of associative learning on lexicaldevelopment. However, there have been no attempts toexplain the atypical lexical development in DS based onatypical associative learning. The long-term potentiation(LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) of synapses,underlying associative learning, are altered in DS. Here wepresent a neural network model that instantiates notions fromneurophysiological studies to account for the disparitiesbetween lexical comprehension and production in DS. Oursimulations show that an atypical LTP/LTD balance affectscomprehension and production differently in an associativemodel of lexical development.

Variability is important to learning; however, whether itsupports or hinders language acquisition is unclear. 3D objectstudies suggest that children learn words better when targetobjects vary, however storybook studies indicate thatcontextual variability impairs learning. We tested a dynamicsystems account in which background variability should boostlearning by speeding the emergence of new behaviors. Twogroups of two-year-old children saw arrays of one novel andtwo known objects on a screen, and heard a novel or knownlabel. Stimuli were identical across conditions, with theexception that in the constant condition objects appeared on awhite background, and in the variable condition backgroundswere colored. Only children in the variable condition showedevidence of word learning, suggesting that extraneousvariability supports learning by decontextualizingrepresentations, and indicating that adding low-level entropyto the developmental system can trigger a change in behavior.

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We evaluate behavioral and neurophysiological data relevant to the theme of prediction in early typical and atypical language acquisition and processing. Results: Poor syntactic awareness--attributable, in part, to an underlying statistical learning deficit--is likely to impede syntax-based predictive processing in children with DLD, conferring deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. Furthermore, there may be a feedback cycle in which poor syntactic awareness impedes children's ability to anticipate upcoming percepts, and this, in turn, makes children unable to improve their syntactic awareness on the basis of prediction error signals. Conclusion: This article offers a refocusing of theory on sentence processing and comprehension deficits in DLD, from a difficulty in processing and integrating perceived syntactic features to a difficulty in anticipating what is coming next., Around 7% of English-speaking children are affected by developmental language disorder (DLD), defined as a severe language deficit in the absence of a clear biomedical cause (Bishop et al., 2016; [...]

The effect of labels on nonlinguistic representations is the focusof substantial debate in the developmental literature. A recentempirical study (Twomey & Westermann, 2016) suggested thatlabels are incorporated into object representations, such thatinfants respond differently to objects for which they know alabel relative to unlabeled objects. However, these empiricaldata cannot differentiate between two recent theories ofintegrated label-object representations, one of which assumeslabels are features of object representations, and one whichassumes labels are represented separately, but become closelyassociated with learning. We address this issue using aneurocomputational (auto-encoder) model to instantiate boththeoretical approaches. Simulation data support an account inwhich labels are features of objects, with the samerepresentational status as the objects’ visual and hapticcharacteristics.

Despite substantial evidence for a bidirectional relationshipbetween language and representation, the roots of this relationshipin infancy are not known. The current study explores thepossibility that labels may affect object representations at theearliest stages of language acquisition. We asked parents to playwith their 10-month-old infants with two novel toys for threeminutes, every day for a week, teaching infants a novel word forone toy but not the other. After a week infants participated in afamiliarization task in which they saw each object for 8 trials insilence, followed by a test trial consisting of both objectsaccompanied by the trained word. Infants exhibited a faster declinein looking times to the previously unlabeled object. These dataspeak to the current debate over the status of labels in humancognition, supporting accounts in which labels are an integral partof representation.

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated information selection that maximizes learning. We first present a neurocomputational model of infant visual category learning, capturing existing empirical data on the role of environmental complexity on learning. Next we "set the model free", allowing it to select its own stimuli based on a formalization of curiosity and three alternative selection mechanisms. We demonstrate that maximal learning emerges when the model is able to maximize stimulus novelty relative to its internal states, depending on the interaction across learning between the structure of the environment and the plasticity in the learner itself. We discuss the implications of this new curiosity mechanism for both existing computational models of reinforcement learning and for our understanding of this fundamental mechanism in early development.

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection task. Two groups of 2-year-old children saw arrays of one novel and two known objects on a screen, and they heard a novel or known label. Stimuli were identical across conditions, with the exception that in the "constant color" condition objects appeared on a uniform white background, and in the "variable color" condition backgrounds were different, uniform colors. At test, only children in the variable condition showed evidence of retaining label-object associations. These data support findings from the adult memory literature, which suggest that variability supports learning by decontextualizing representations. We argue that these data are consistent with dynamic systems accounts of learning in which low-level entropy adds sufficient noise to the developmental system to precipitate a change in behavior.

This study set out to examine whether shyness, an aversion to novelty and unfamiliar social situations, can affect the processes that underlie early word learning. Twenty-four-month-old children (n = 32 ) were presented with sets of one novel and two familiar objects, and it was found that shyer children were less likely to select a novel object as the referent of a novel label. Furthermore, not-shy children then showed evidence of retaining these novel mappings, but shy children did not. These findings suggest that shy children's aversion to novelty and to the unfamiliar context can impact on their word learning.

A constructivist neural network model is presented that learns the past tense of English verbs. The model builds its architecture in response to the learning task in a way consistent with neurobiological and psychological evidence. The model outperforms existing connectionist and symbolic past tense models in terms of learning and generalization behavior, and it displays a U-shaped learning curve for many irregular verbs. The trained model develops a modular architecture with dissociations between regular and irregular verbs, and lesioning the different pathways leads to results comparable with neurological disorders. It is argued that the successof the model is due to its constructivist nature, and that the distinction between fixed-architecture and constructivist models is fundamental. Given this distinction, constructivist systems provide more realistic models of cognitive development.

modular connectionist network is described that learns the German verb paradigm. The architecture of the network is in accordance with the rule-associative memory hypothesis proposed by Pinker (1991): it is composed of a connectionist short-term memory enabling it to process symbolic rules and an associative memory acting as a lexicon. The network successfully learns the German verb paradigm and generalizes to novel verbs in ways that correspond to empirical data. Lesioning the model gives further evidence for the rule-associative memory hypothesis: Whe n the lexicon is cut off, the network strongly overgeneralizes the regular participle, indicating that regular forms are produced with the shortterm memory but irregular forms rely on the lexicon. However, in contrast to the rule-association theory, the two paths are not strongly dissociated, but both the short-term memory and the lexicon work together in producing many participles. The success of the network model is seen as evidence that emergent linguistic rules need not be implemented as rules in the brain.