Bye-bye mummy: word comprehension in 9-month-old infants

From the little research that exists on the onset of word learning in infants under the age of 1 year, the evidence suggests an idiosyncratic comprehensive vocabulary is developing. To further this field, we tested 49 nine-month-old infants by pre-assessing their vocabularies using a UK version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. Intermodal preferential looking (IPL) was then used to examine word comprehension including: (a) words parents reported as understood, (b) words infants are expected to understand according to age-related frequency data, and (c) words parents had reported infants not to understand. Assuming parents are good assessors of their infant's early word knowledge, we expected a naming effect with IPL in condition (a), but not condition (c). As language research uses standard samples of words, we expected a discernible naming effect in condition (b). Results show clear IPL evidence of word comprehension for those words that parents reported their infants to understand (condition a). This agreement between methods demonstrates the usefulness of parental communicative developmental inventory in conjunction with IPL to assess infant's individual word knowledge. No naming effects were found for condition (c) and the lack of naming effects in (b) shows that pre-established word lists may not give a sufficiently clear picture of infant's true vocabulary – an important insight for researchers and practitioners alike

Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own-name recognition at 5 months.

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure

Interacting mindreaders

Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader's target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition

Building a Multimodal Lexicon: Lessons from Infants' Learning of Body Part Words

Human children outperform artificial learners because the former quickly acquire a multimodal, syntactically informed, and ever-growing lexicon with little evidence. Most of this lexicon is unlabelled and processed with unsupervised mechanisms, leading to robust and generalizable knowledge. In this paper, we summarize results related to 4-month-olds’ learning of body part words. In addition to providing direct experimental evidence on some of the Workshop’s assumptions, we suggest several avenues of research that may be useful to those developing and testing artificial learners. A first set of studies using a controlled laboratory learning paradigm shows that human infants learn better from tactile-speech than visual-speech co-occurrences, suggesting that the signal/modality should be considered when designing and exploiting multimodal learning tasks. A series of observational studies document the ways in which parents naturally structure the multimodal information they provide for infants, which probably happens in lexically specific ways. Finally, our results suggest that 4-month-olds can pick up on co-occurrences between words and specific touch locations (a prerequisite of learning an association between a body part word and the referent on the child’s own body) after very brief exposures, which we interpret as most compatible with unsupervised predictive models of learning

Exam corrections and student self-evaluation: Pilot study

Do college students use exam correction opportunities and self-evaluation exercises to improve their study strategies and to increase their interactions with the professor? This is an exploratory study to collect student opinions about and experiences with a modified self-correcting approach to multiple-choice tests for students in content-heavy psychology courses. a self-correcting approach to multiple choice tests creates an opportunity for students to reflect on their exam performance and study strategies potentially promoting their metacognitive awareness and metastrategic knowledge. I hypothesize that, in addition to potentially improving students' exam performance, the exam correction and self-evaluation method I used might provide students with a defined purpose for attending office hours, increased contact with the instructor, and observable examples of the student's ability to reflect and evaluate their strategies. Exam correction methods potentially create opportunities for faculty-student engagement that support higher education best practices

Exam corrections and student self-evaluation: Pilot study

Do college students use exam correction opportunities and self-evaluation exercises to improve their study strategies and to increase their interactions with the professor? This is an exploratory study to collect student opinions about and experiences with a modified self-correcting approach to multiple-choice tests for students in content-heavy psychology courses. a self-correcting approach to multiple choice tests creates an opportunity for students to reflect on their exam performance and study strategies potentially promoting their metacognitive awareness and metastrategic knowledge. I hypothesize that, in addition to potentially improving students' exam performance, the exam correction and self-evaluation method I used might provide students with a defined purpose for attending office hours, increased contact with the instructor, and observable examples of the student's ability to reflect and evaluate their strategies. Exam correction methods potentially create opportunities for faculty-student engagement that support higher education best practices