How language input shapes word learning? A longitudinal study in young children

How language input shapes word learning? A longitudinal study in young children

Cindy Bellanger1, Jean-Pierre Chevrot2, and Elsa Spinelli1

1. Université Grenoble-Alpes, LPNC, Grenoble, France

2. Laboratoire Lidilem, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France

We carried out a 3-month longitudinal study on 27 2-year-old French children to assess the influence of language input on word learning and word segmentation abilities. We manipulated the linguistic input by creating DVD stories including pseudo-nouns designating fictional animals. Half of them were presented with four different determiners (variability condition) and the other half were always presented with the same determiner (non-variability condition). After each month watching daily the stories on DVDs, children were tested with 2 perception tasks testing pseudo-noun recognition and 2 production tasks testing pseudo-noun segmentation and noun-phrase fluency. According to the principles of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1953) certain abstract grammatical categories are early available. Noun-phrase utterances are then segmented and determiners and nouns are directly addressed to the corresponding categories and can be reused (Valian, 2014). In contrast, Usage-Based accounts (Tomasello, 2003) expect noun-phrase utterances to be stored as a whole. Determiner-noun segmentation happens later by hearing nouns in various contexts (Pine et al., 2013). Usage-Based accounts thus predict differences in pseudo-nouns segmentation and fluency between the variability and non-variability conditions. Such differences are not expected by Universal Grammar. The data are currently analyzed and results will be available soon.