Padraic Monaghan

Purpose: For neurotypical children, accurate generalisation of newly learnt object names is facilitated by ‘desirable difficulty’ during initial referent selection; holding colour constant across competitors strengthens encoding of the intended referent’s category-defining shape. We investigated whether variability in colour at referent selection similarly influences novel label generalisation in vocabulary-delayed autistic children – a population potentially characterised by differences in shape encoding. Methods: Thirty-two autistic ( M age = 116.63 months) and 32 neurotypical ( M age = 56.72 months) children matched on receptive vocabulary (autistic M age equivalent = 67.78 months; neurotypical M age equivalent = 68.25 months) used a touchscreen computer to disambiguate new noun-object mappings with objects of the same or different colours. Children were then tested on their retention and shape-based generalisation after a 5-minute delay. Results: Neurotypical children’s generalisation was significantly more accurate - and only above-chance - in the same colour condition. Conversely, autistic children displayed similar above-chance generalisation accuracy in both the same and different colours conditions. For referent selection and retention, children in both groups achieved above-chance accuracy, with no significant differences between conditions. Finally, response time at referent selection, retention, and generalisation did not significantly differ between populations or conditions. Conclusion: Unlike neurotypical children, autistic children were not similarly disadvantaged by variability in object colour at referent selection, suggesting robust encoding of shape across perceptually varied learning conditions. Crucially, these findings demonstrate that beneficial and non-beneficial word learning environments may differ for autistic and neurotypical children.

Musical training has been suggested to modify acoustic perception in language. For native speakers of non-tonal languages, learning tonal words is particularly challenging because lexical tone contrasts are absent from their native phonological systems. Here, we test whether and how music–language relationships extend to second-language tonal word learning in cross-situational learning (CSL), a learning paradigm in which word–meaning mappings must be inferred from ambiguous input and rely critically on accurate sound perception. Ninety-one native English speakers completed a CSL task involving tonal disyllabic pseudowords that contrasted segmental and suprasegmental features. Musical training, musical aptitude (pitch, tempo, and melodic perceptual ability), CSL performance, and post-learning awareness of tonal pitch and syllable duration were assessed. Results showed that musical training did not yield a general learning advantage; instead, its effects were primarily indirect and cue dependent. Musical perceptual aptitudes predicted CSL and mediated the relationship between musical training and CSL. A direct effect of musical training on CSL was observed only in duration-based trials, where acoustic cues were highly salient. Our exploratory analyses further suggest that musical training may also directly contribute to the development of explicit knowledge during CSL.Keywords & key phrases Musical training, Musical aptitude, cross-situational statistical learning, tonal languages, mediation path analysis

Previous laboratory-based studies of sound symbolism tend to use established sound and meaning distinctions and find strong effects in participants forming mappings between them. Yet sound symbolism in natural language is extant, but only a weak effect. Without constraints and cueing to categorical distinctions in meaning, are sound symbolic effects still observable? We asked 40 participants to draw figures in response to 20 novel words presented auditorially varying in consonant and vowel properties. Plosives and front vowels resulted in more angular and straight-lined figures, whereas sonorants and back vowels elicited more rounded and curved shapes. The results are consistent with the classic bouba-kiki (takete-maluma) effect and show that both consonants and vowels can systematically shape sound-meaning mappings in the absence of explicit constraints. While natural language statistics may partly explain these effects, the consistency across phonemes – including those not frequent in English – suggests deeper perceptual or cognitive origins.

Memory for emotional information is greater than for non-emotional information and is enhanced by sleep-related consolidation. Previous studies have focused on emotional arousal and valence of established stimuli, but what is the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotional information? Figurative expressions, which are pervasive in everyday communication, are often rated as higher in emotionality than their literal counterparts, but the effect of emotionality on the learning of metaphors, and the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotionally negative, positive and neutral language, is as yet poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to memorise conventional (e.g. ‘ sunny disposition’ ) and novel (e.g. ‘ cloudy disposition’ ) metaphorical word pairs varying in valence, accompanied by their definitions. After a 12-hour period of sleep or wake, participants were tested on their recognition of word pairs and recall of definitions. We found higher arousal ratings were related to increased recognition and recall performance. Furthermore, sleep increased the accurate recognition of all word pairs compared to wake but also reduced the valence of word pairs. The results indicate better memory for newly acquired emotional stimuli, a benefit of sleep for memory, but also a reduction in emotional arousal as a consequence of sleep consolidation.

Monolingual children tend to assume that a word labels only one object, and this mutual exclusivity supports referent selection and retention of novel words. Bilingual children accept two labels for an object (lexical overlap) for referent selection more than monolingual children, but in these previous studies, information about speakers’ language backgrounds was minimal. We investigated monolingual and bilingual 4-year-old children’s ability to apply mutual exclusivity and lexical overlap flexibly when objects were labelled either by one or two speakers with the same or different language backgrounds. We tested referent selection and retention of word–object mappings. Both language groups performed similarly for mutual exclusivity, were more likely to accept lexical overlap in the two-language than one-language condition, and performance was similar for referent selection and later retention. Monolingual and bilingual children can adapt their word-learning strategies to cope with the demands of different linguistic contexts.

Learning to map novel words onto their intended referents is a complex challenge, and one that becomes even harder when acquiring multiple languages. We investigated how label mixing affected learning novel words in one versus two languages. In a cross-situational word learning study, 80 adult participants learned either one-to-one word–object mappings, or two-to-one mappings, reflecting different challenges in learning one or two languages. We manipulated whether mappings co-occurred locally, where repetitions were prevalent, or whether co-occurrences were more distributed throughout exposure. Learners acquired two-to-one mappings better when they did not occur in local co-occurrences, but there was no effect of learning conditions for one-to-one mappings. Whether participants were proficient or not in an additional language did not have an observable effect on the learning. We suggest that local co-occurrences of multiple labels, as in language mixing environments, increase the challenge of learning words, though this effect may be only short-lived.

Recent evidence from cross-situational learning (CSL) studies have shown that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously when sentences of the novel language co-occur with dynamic scenes to which they refer. Syntactic bootstrapping accounts suggest that grammatical knowledge may help scaffold vocabulary acquisition by constraining possible meanings, thus, for children, words and grammar may be acquired at different rates. Twenty children (ages 8 to 9) were exposed in a CSSL study to an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, and case markers occurring within a verb-final grammatical structure. Children acquired syntax (i.e., word order) effectively, but we found no evidence of vocabulary learning, whereas previous adult studies showed learning of both from similar input. Grammatical information may thus be available early for children, to help constrain and support later vocabulary learning. We propose that gradual maturation of declarative memory systems may result in more effective vocabulary learning in adults.

Recent evidence (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2021; Rebuschat et al., 2021) showed that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously by tracking cross-situational statistics. In this study, we tested whether cross-situational learning (CSL) is powerful enough to support simultaneous learning in younger learners. Twenty children (ages 8 to 9) were exposed to a complex artificial language comprising novel nouns, verbs, case markers, with variable word order by means of a CSL paradigm, adapted from Rebuschat et al. (2021). We found that participants were rapidly able to learn the novel word order but failed to learn the novel vocabulary. The results can shed light on the understanding of differences in CSL across the life span and provide further empirical evidence for the cognitive underpinnings of child-adult differences in the earliest stages of language acquisition.

Learning the meaning of a word is a difficult task due to the variety of possible referents present in the environment. Visual cues such as gestures frequently accompany speech and have the potential to reduce referential uncertainty and promote learning, but the dynamics of pointing cues and speech integration are not yet known. If word learning is influenced by when, as well as whether, a learner is directed correctly to a target, then this would suggest temporal integration of visual and speech information can affect the strength of association of word–referent mappings. Across two pre-registered studies, we tested the conditions under which pointing cues promote learning. In a cross-situational word learning paradigm, we showed that the benefit of a pointing cue was greatest when the cue preceded the speech label, rather than following the label (Study 1). In an eye-tracking study (Study 2), the early cue advantage was due to participants’ attention being directed to the referent during label utterance, and this advantage was apparent even at initial exposures of word–referent pairs. Pointing cues promote time-coupled integration of visual and auditory information that aids encoding of word–referent pairs, demonstrating the cognitive benefits of pointing cues occurring prior to speech.