title: Distributional structure in language: contributions to noun-verb difficulty differences in infant word recognition.
abstract: What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easier to recognize than verbs in fluent speech. However, there are situations in which distributional statistics provide similar support for verbs. The statistics for verbs that occur with the English morpheme -ing, for example, should facilitate verb recognition. In two experiments with 7.5- and 9.5-month-old infants, we tested the importance of distributional statistics for word recognition by varying the frequency of the contextual frames in which verbs occur. The results support the conclusion that distributional statistics are utilized by infant language learners and contribute to noun-verb differences in word recognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, United States. Electronic address: jon.willits@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jon A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Willits
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Mark S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Seidenberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Jenny R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Saffran
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011337:Probability Learning; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Language acquisition; Statistical learning; Verb learning; Word recognition