Learning the meaning of “ um ”
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Celeste Kidd
Abstract
Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to infer speakers' communicative intentions (e.g. joint visual attention, pointing). We review evidence from eye-tracking studies that suggests that by 2;6 years of age, children use another previously unexplored cue to infer speakers' communicative intentions: speech disfluencies. Disfluencies (e.g. “uh” and “um”) often occur before unfamiliar, infrequent, and discourse-new words. Thus, disfluencies provide information about a speaker's intended referent. Further children use the presence of a disfluency before an object label to anticipate a novel, discourse-new referent. These results demonstrate that children go beyond their input, acquiring the generalization that disfluencies precede not just specific words, but rather categories of words that are difficult to produce. Keywords: Language acquisition; speech disfluencies; lexical development; eye-tracking; attention
Abstract
Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to infer speakers' communicative intentions (e.g. joint visual attention, pointing). We review evidence from eye-tracking studies that suggests that by 2;6 years of age, children use another previously unexplored cue to infer speakers' communicative intentions: speech disfluencies. Disfluencies (e.g. “uh” and “um”) often occur before unfamiliar, infrequent, and discourse-new words. Thus, disfluencies provide information about a speaker's intended referent. Further children use the presence of a disfluency before an object label to anticipate a novel, discourse-new referent. These results demonstrate that children go beyond their input, acquiring the generalization that disfluencies precede not just specific words, but rather categories of words that are difficult to produce. Keywords: Language acquisition; speech disfluencies; lexical development; eye-tracking; attention
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Extracting regularities
- Toward a theory of gradual morphosyntactic learning 15
- Cues to form and function in the acquisition of German number and case inflection 35
- Developing first contrasts in Spanish verb inflection 53
-
Part II. Multiple cues in learning to communicate
- A new look at redundancy in children's gesture and word combinations 75
- Learning the meaning of “ um ” 91
-
Part III. Discovering units
- From first words to segments 109
- Analysis and generalization across verbs and constructions 135
- Two- and three-year-olds' linguistic generalizations are prudent adaptations to the language they hear 153
- Units of learning in language acquisition 167
-
Part IV. Individual differences
- Causes and consequences of variability in early language learning 181
- Individual differences in measures of linguistic experience account for variability in the sentence processing skill of five-year-olds 203
- Genetic variation and individual differences in language 223
-
Part V. Mechanisms for learning
- Language as a process 241
- Memory, sleep and generalization in language acquisition 261
- Bayesian modeling of sources of constraint in language acquisition 277
- Index 295
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Extracting regularities
- Toward a theory of gradual morphosyntactic learning 15
- Cues to form and function in the acquisition of German number and case inflection 35
- Developing first contrasts in Spanish verb inflection 53
-
Part II. Multiple cues in learning to communicate
- A new look at redundancy in children's gesture and word combinations 75
- Learning the meaning of “ um ” 91
-
Part III. Discovering units
- From first words to segments 109
- Analysis and generalization across verbs and constructions 135
- Two- and three-year-olds' linguistic generalizations are prudent adaptations to the language they hear 153
- Units of learning in language acquisition 167
-
Part IV. Individual differences
- Causes and consequences of variability in early language learning 181
- Individual differences in measures of linguistic experience account for variability in the sentence processing skill of five-year-olds 203
- Genetic variation and individual differences in language 223
-
Part V. Mechanisms for learning
- Language as a process 241
- Memory, sleep and generalization in language acquisition 261
- Bayesian modeling of sources of constraint in language acquisition 277
- Index 295
