Language acquisition/cognitive development

Saturday, October 01st,   2011 [17:20 - 19:20]

PS_2.090 - One-week life of a new word. Fast ERP signatures in learning new words

Havas, V. ¹ , de Diego-Balaguer, R. ^{1, 2, 3} & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. ^{1, 2, 3}

1 Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group [Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute-] IDIBELL, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain
2 Dept. of Basic Psychology, Campus Bellvitge, University of Barcelona, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain
3 Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

In the present study we investigated the processes underlying word learning in adults and their neural correlates using event-related potentials (ERP). Two ERP experiments were conduced in which Spanish participants were exposed to Hungarian words in two ERP-sessions (one week apart). The amount of exposition of the new-words was carefully controlled: (i) two presentations (1st day and 2nd day), (ii) three presentations (two during 1st day and one during the 2nd day) and (iii) multiple presentations during the first day. Using this design and introducing several control conditions (legal pseudowords and Spanish words) we evaluated the ERP modulations depending on the amount of exposition to the new-words and were able to track the different ERP changes associated to same-day repetition vs. one-week repetition. Interestingly, we observed the modulation of two components which has been previously associated to fast word learning: the P2 and the N4. The evolution of the P2 and N4 depended on the number of presentations and the intra-day or between-day presentations. These results might be discussed considering how learners could be able to extract regularities of the new language in a fast and flexible way and in which degree memory consolidation processes influenced the present P2/N4 modulations.

PS_2.091 - Frequency and imageability effects in children's processing of inflected forms

Dye, C. ^{1, 3} , Walenski, M. ² , Prado, B. . ³ , Mostofsky, S. . ⁴ & Ullman, M. ³

1 University of Salford
2 University of California San Diego
3 Georgetown University
4 Johns Hopkins University

Language requires both storage and composition. However, exactly what is memorized and what is assembled remains controversial. Inflectional morphology and particularly examination of regular and irregular past tense forms have been a fertile terrain for investigating this issue. Recent work showed that in adults the storage vs. composition of past tense forms is influenced by factors such as frequency and imagebility, with frequency being the most important. The aim of the present study was to examine how such factors might affect storage vs. composition in children. Fifty-three normally developing children with ages ranging from 8 to 12 were tested on a past tense production task which involved 32 regular forms (e.g., fail-failed) and 32 irregular forms (e.g., hold-held). Results indicate that children generally resemble adults, however, in children imageability seems to play a more important role. Details of the analysis and results are presented, along with discussion and implications.

PS_2.092 - Early -20 to 27 months- formation of syntactic processing

López-Ornat, S. , Gómez Martínez-Piñeiro, F. & Gallego, C.

Departamento de Procesos Cognitivos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

A detailed investigation on syntactic-seeming changes in the speech of a Spanish child (20 - 27 months) was carried out. It was hypothesised the process would be gradual, and show local dependencies, rather than reflect underlying abstract syntactic rules. All the child´s productions during 7 months were coded, and analyzed with CLAN (CHILDES Database instrument) to identify such changes. The syntactic structure of the mother’s input was similarly analysed. The data were tested statistically for the significance of differences found. Unexpected results show that along with the two-word constructions, the child produced elliptical forms, increasingly so over time. Linguistic experience seems partly responsible for this, as analysis of input to the child found a constant number of elliptical constructions. Input and output, nevertheless, did not match perfectly. There were interesting differences in the syntactic structure of the elliptical forms of child and mother, probably reflecting the bias introduced by the child´s own learning system. Finally, the child´s elliptical forms were only situational at the beginning becoming gradually more general. The findings support the hypothesis and provide unforeseen insight into the role of syntactic fragments of input and output in the formation of the syntactic processing system.

PS_2.093 - It‘s raining cats and ‘binus’! - lexico-semantic integration of newly learned object names as measured in two classic naming paradigms

Geukes, S. & Zwitserlood, P.

Institute of Psychology. Westphalian Wilhelm-University. Muenster, Germany

The picture-word interference (PWI) and blocked naming (BN) paradigms have been frequently applied in mono- and bilingual settings to index lexical and semantic relationships between native and second language words, and their respective concepts. They allow to distinguish subtle differences in the processing of languages learned earlier and later in life. However, due to the historic focus on mid- to long-term bilinguals, relatively little is known so far about semantic integration of newly learned words immediately after learning. In our study, we therefore looked at short-term lexico-semantic effects of word-to-concept learning, using an artificial vocabulary. Over a few days, participants learned a set of pseudowords as names for common objects by means of a statistical learning procedure. These newly learned names, along with corresponding native language names, were used in PWI and BN tasks. Semantic inhibition effects were found for both native and novel object names, indicating that the novel names were rapidly integrated with conceptual memory after few exposures. These results conflict with models of bilingual representation that predict conceptual integration of novel words only for advanced stages of learning.

PS_2.094 - Setting the alarm takes longer than you think: the role of consolidation in acquiring words' emotional attributes

Dumay, N. ¹ , Sharma, D. ² , Kellen, N. ² & Abdelrahim, S. ²

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain
2 School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

This study examines how words' emotional attributes affect linguistic processing and whether their acquisition requires consolidation. Participants were exposed to two sets of associations between made-up words (e.g., 'knirck'), both spoken and written, and pictures with either an emotionally negative or a neutral content (e.g., 'a dead sheep' vs. 'a pizza'). One set of associations was learnt one week before the test, giving them more time/sleep to consolidate; the other set was learnt either 6hrs or immediately before the test. The novel words' ability to evoke their emotional attributes was assessed using both a Stroop-like colour identification task (which did not work) and an auditory analog, i.e., pause detection. Picture-word association showed poorer memory for negative than neutral words and similar forgetting in both conditions. In striking contrast, pause detection revealed no emotionality effect for words learnt either 6hrs or immediately before the test (-4 and -3 ms), but robust interference (+30 ms) for seven-day old negative compared to neutral words. These findings indicate that it takes words' emotional attributes between 6hrs and seven days to be fully operational. Given our rotated design, they also demonstrate that alarming words produce a cost in attentional tasks orthogonal to word processing.

PS_2.095 - Electrophysiological auditory responses and language development in infants with periventricular leukomalacia

Avecilla Ramirez, G. N. ^{1, 2} , Ruiz-Correa, S. ³ , Marroquín, J. L. ³ , Harmony, T. ¹ , Alba, A. ⁴ & Mendoza-Montoya, O. ³

1 Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
2 Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
3 Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas
4 Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí

This study presents evidence suggesting that electrophysiological responses to languagerelated auditory stimuli recorded at 46 weeks postconceptional age (PCA) are associated with language development, particularly in infants with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL). In order to investigate this hypothesis, electrophysiological responses to a set of auditory stimuli consisting of series of syllables and tones were recorded from a population of infants with PVL at 46 weeks PCA. A communicative development inventory (i.e., parent report) was applied to this population during a follow-up study performed at 14 months of age. The results of this later test were analyzed with a statistical clustering procedure, which resulted in two well-defined groups identified as the high-score (HS) and low-score (LS) groups. The event-induced power of the EEG data recorded at 46 weeks postconceptional age (PCA) was analyzed using a dimensionality reduction approach, resulting in a
new set of descriptive variables. The LS and HS groups formed well-separated clusters in the space spanned by these descriptive variables, which can therefore be used to predict whether a new subject will belong to either of these groups. A predictive classification rate of 80% was obtained by using a
linear classifier that was trained with a leave-one-out cross-validation technique.

PS_2.096 - Basic auditory processing predicts rule learning in early infancy

Mueller, J. , Friederici, A. D. & Männel, C.

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science

The ability to discover remote dependencies between speech units is a basic requirement for language acquisition. We applied event-related potentials in a passive oddball paradigm to test whether this capacity is influenced by the development of auditory perception. Standard stimuli consisted of three-syllabic spoken sequences that followed two different AXB rules for which A syllables predicted B syllables with variable X syllables. Interspersed among standards were pitch deviants and rule deviants, i.e. violations of the final B element according to the AXB rules. Infants were grouped according to the polarity of their mismatch responses to the pitch deviant as an index for the maturational status of the auditory cortex. Only those infants who showed a negativity for the pitch deviants showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. In an adult control group no rule deviance effects were found. We conclude that the ability to extract remote dependencies is present in early infancy and critically depends on the maturational status of basic auditory mechanisms. Interestingly, it seems to be absent in its automatic form in adulthood. Future research is needed to test the impact of the observed early interindividual differences in perceptual functions on later stages of language acquisition.