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Laying the Foundation: Extracting Partial Meanings of Hard Nouns via Observational Contexts
Full text linkA key aspect of understanding how children learn the meanings of words involves understanding how they mine different sources of information (e.g., observational, linguistic) in the service of learning. According to one dominant view, there exists a class of words (i.e., “hard words”; Gleitman et al., 2005) for which learning their meaning requires access to information beyond the observational contexts in which those words occur. Building upon previous work on this topic that employed the Human Simulation Paradigm, a paradigm commonly used for investigating vocabulary learning, the current study revisits the role of observational contexts for the acquisition of one class of hard words: nouns that denote non-basic level object categories (or “hard nouns”; see Kako, 2005). These data reveal that although observational contexts may not be sufficient to yield learning of precise hard noun meanings, they allow learners to extract systematic partial knowledge, knowledge that may lay a critical foundation for meaning
acquisition
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Partial Verb Learning via Observational Contexts
Full text linkChildren learn nouns more readily than verbs in early development. Research on candidate explanations for this noun advantage has suggested that, while noun meanings can be easily gleaned from their observational contexts, verb meanings require access to their syntactic constructions, which remain inaccessible until later in development (Gentner, 2006; McDonough et al., 2011; Piccin & Waxman, 2007). This study asks whether previous demonstrations of tenuous verb learning from their observational contexts are partly due to the assessment method. In an adapted version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP; Gillette et al., 1999), we assessed verb learning using multiple tasks. When verb learning was assessed via a free-response task, learning was minimal, replicating the challenge of learning precise verb meanings via observational contexts. The findings from both a categorization and semantic similarity task, however, suggest that learners do acquire partial knowledge of both action and mental verbs via their observational contexts
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Revisiting the Role of Observational Contexts for Learning Hard Nouns
Full text linkChildren learn words that name objects (“ball”) and those that name abstract concepts (“story”). One view of learning is that different inputs matter for different words (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). That is, many argue that although the observational contexts in which words occur are sufficient for learning object names, they are not for learning abstract “hard words” (Gleitman et al., 2005). This study revisited the contributions of observational contexts to learning one type of hard word: nouns denoting non-basic level object categories (“hard nouns” like “friend”; Kako, 2005). In a new artificial learning paradigm, we reveal that although observational contexts were insufficient for full hard noun learning, they afforded learners partial knowledge that allowed them to succeed in some learning tasks. These data highlight how observational contexts may lay the foundation for learning hard nouns, and underscore how definitions of learning impact our understanding of how the input shapes it
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Beyond Word Meaning Mappings: The Role of Low-Informative Events in Conceptual Alignment
Full text linkWord meanings are rarely transparent from their extralinguistic contexts. How children learn words from an input with "low-informative" (LI) events is of interest because even adults struggle to learn from LI events (Gleitman & Trueswell, 2020; Medina et al., 2011). This study revisited LI events' contribution to learning by probing what can be gleaned from LI events even if they don't yield exact meanings. Adults (N = 120) learned words (e.g., "modi") that had English meanings (e.g., "apple") from LI events. Participants then both guessed the word's exact meaning and rated several candidate meanings. Although LI events failed to yield accurate mappings of meanings, they led to representations (derived via the ratings) that were semantically aligned with those of the true meanings. These results highlight the potential for LI events to get learning off the ground and the implications of viewing word learning as more than a mapping problem
Laying the Foundation: Extracting Partial Meanings of Hard Nouns via Observational Contexts
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How words can be learned by observation depends on what is meant by “learned”
Full text linkWord learners experience naming events differing widely in their referential quality. Whereas referents of some naming events are transparent from their extralinguistic contexts, referents of many naming events are ambiguous. Word learning theories are divided in whether learners mainly learn from a few transparent events or whether learners also aggregate across ambiguous ones. Data consistent with the former view are evident in the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) in which naïve observers must identify parents’ words from muted vignettes of parent-toddler interactions. The HSP reveals that even adults struggle to identify the identity of parents’ words across ambiguous vignettes. Our work revisits the HSP by examining how alterations to its dependent variable affects the conclusions about the naming events that shape learning. This work underscores how one’s definition of learning has implications for both accounts of the mechanisms of learning as well as accounts of the relevant input into those mechanisms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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