Poster workshop discussion
Chair: Graham Schafer
Discussant: Margaret Harris
The five posters presented here all address the issue of the extent to which early language comprehension may be governed byÑrather than simply Ôtaking account of'Ñearly experience. The contributors use a similar paradigm (preferential looking: Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), in a number of different laboratories, to test infants' sensitivity to various aspects of the environment, manipulated a priori by the experimenter.We explore the early language development of infants (9 to 28 months) in terms of specific measures of their experience in different domains. For instance, participants' experience of (and hence knowledge about) objects, speech, gaze, joint naming routines, and other statistical regularities in the environment are manipulated by the experimenters. Infants' receptive responses to language are then measured in a closely controlled laboratory environment, where the effects of experienceÑboth recent, long term, and cross-sequentiallyÑcan be assessed. Long term factors include measures of vocabulary development, and also longitudinal training intervention with specific words and referents. Short-term interventions take the form of periods of training in the laboratory immediately before testing, in which infants are presented with pairs of images where one is consistently named and one is not, or where one image is named by a Ôface' and one is named without gaze, or where infants are presented with word-object associations relying on minimal or non-minimal contrasts. In testing, we establish the contribution of these short- and long-term manipulations, as well as examining the effects of departures from prototypical representations. The contribution of this group of posters is thus richly interconnected, and opportunities exist for exchanges on theoretical, empirical, and methodological terms.Potential discussion points: (1) Three of these posters concentrate on the issue of consistency (covariation), in terms of either training, or departures from prototypicality. (2) The posters all speak, in different ways, to the currently important issue of the influence of naming on categorization and vice versa. (3) To what extent does vocabulary size mediate early-emerging lexical behaviors? Such ideas may form the basis of a discussion of the potential explicatory value of such mechanism(s) for the understanding of the phenomena of early vocabulary development.Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Cauley, K.M., & Gordon, L. (1987). The eyes have it: Lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. Journal of Child Language, 14, 23-45.
Details of individual items:
poster WS disc