Effects of Reading on Word Learning By: Haley Weaver

Introduction Senior receiving a dual degree in Brain and Cognitive Science and Linguistics Lab Involvement: Worked with Adults on a task looking at multiple languages and attention SEEDLINGS Syracuse University Speech Production Lab Rochester Baby Lab

Outline Research Project Mini-Lecture: Formulating Research Questions Background Information Methods Results Discussion Preliminary Conclusions Mini-Lecture: Formulating Research Questions

SEEDLingS: The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills -46 infants from 6 to 18 months

Picture Book Study Banoona Shang Dax - Sub study completed at either 10, 14, or 18 months

Research Questions How does the quantity of speech input in reading compare to day to day interactions? How does the input of goal oriented reading task differ from normal reading and does that impact language at 18 months? How do parents interact with their child while performing a goal oriented reading task, and does that affect the word learning?

Background I Montag, Jones, and Smith (2015) Text in books expose children to more unique words than normal day to day conversations “With our data, we could not compute the true type-token ratios that a child might encounter in the text of picture books and in child-directed speech” (pg 1495)

Background II Liu (2014) Using more words in isolation during picture book reading at 6-12 months is negatively correlated with language abilities at 5 years old Using more “target words” in reading lead to lower language abilities at 5 years old

Background III 10 months 18 month Isolated word input helps children learn word boundaries (Lew- Williams, Pelucchi, and Saffran, 2011) Provides transitional probabilities Children need variability in input Learn words better when they are in sentence frames (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006) Using higher order linguistic cues to learn words

Methods Read the picture book 2x a day for 2 weeks (28 recordings) Eye-tracking:

Transcription Transcribe all nouns Utterance type Presence Speaker Utterance types R: reading D: declarative I: imperative N: non-utterance Q: question S: singing U: unsure Basic Level: put everything in its most basic form (plurals go to singulars)

Results: Quantity of Input Type= number of unique words Token= total number of words heard When a child hears more total words (tokens) they hear more unique words (types) Type Just video data:: sampling a random distribution of natural conversations Count the number of types and tokens Subset of 253 samples each dot is a subject at a particular month Example: If a kid heard the word dog 50 times in an hour recording they would have a token count of 50, but a type count of 1 Reading and non-reading input have similar type-token trajectories Token

Results: Hearing more total words in one input does not correlate to hearing more total words in another Reading to Picture Book Reading Reading to Non-reading Picture Book Reading to Non-reading Tokens in Picture Book Tokens in Picture Book Tokens in Reading Kendall correlations Reading to IDS: tau= .07 Reading to PB: tau= .03 PB to IDS: tau=.05 Tokens in Non-reading Tokens in Picture Book Tokens in Picture Book

Results: Utterance Types Percent d: declarative i: imperative n: non-utterance q: question r: reading s: singing u:unsure Percentage of reading decreases with age Percentage of non-utterances increases with age Utterance Type

Preliminary Conclusions: Unique Words Reading provides a similar number of unique types as natural IDS hearing more words in reading or natural conversation does not seem to predict hearing more words in goal oriented reading Differences in results in comparison to Montag and colleagues (2015): data sampling Books that parents read

Preliminary Conclusions: Utterance Type Amount of reading seems to decrease with age Amount of word use in isolation seems to increase with age Differences in input may be the result of using novel words Non-utterances allow one to one mapping between a lexical form and a visual representation How does the percent of words heard in isolation relate to a child’s word learning? Amount of reading Maybe children are hearing the words in contexts other than reading As children age parents tend to use more advanced conversation styles Words in Isolation Parents are trying to actively teach their children to the task they will perform The eye tracking task maps tests that kids know if a lexical form goes with a specific exemplar By using non-utterances it facilitates word-concept mapping

How do I find a research topic? So I have data… How do I find a research topic?

1. Brainstorm What kinds of language ideas am I interested in? Parental Input? Word Learning? Syntactic Structure Usage?

2. Find a Paper Read some research papers that explore the topic Can you use the corpus to answer any of the questions posed by the author? Can you test the claims of the paper using the naturalistic data? Different subject populations?

3. Look at the Analysis See if you could easily recreate some of the graphs in the paper you find If not, look at the types of analysis used here