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Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2016). Examining referential uncertainty in naturalistic contexts from the child’s view: Evidence from an eye-tracking study with infants. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. Trueswell (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2027-2032). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Young Infants are prolific word learners even though they are facing the challenge of referential uncertainty (Quine, 1960). Many laboratory studies have shown that infants are skilled at inferring correct referents of words from ambiguous contexts (Swingley, 2009). However, little is known regarding how they visually attend to and select the target object among many other objects in view when parents name it during everyday interactions. By investigating the looking pattern of 12-month-old infants using naturalistic first-person images with varying degrees of referential ambiguity, we found that infants’ attention is selective and they only select a small subset of objects to attend to at each learning instance despite the complexity of the data in the real world. This work allows us to better understand how perceptual properties of objects in infants’ view influence their visual attention, which is also related to how they select candidate objects to build word-object mappings. -
Zhou, W., & Broersma, M. (2014). Perception of birth language tone contrasts by adopted Chinese children. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 63-66).Abstract
The present study investigates how long after adoption adoptees forget the phonology of their birth language. Chinese children who were adopted by Dutch families were tested on the perception of birth language tone contrasts before, during, and after perceptual training. Experiment 1 investigated Cantonese tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 5 (Low-Rising), and Experiment 2 investigated Mandarin tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 3 (Low-Dipping). In both experiments, participants were adoptees and non-adopted Dutch controls. Results of both experiments show that the tone contrasts were very difficult to perceive for the adoptees, and that adoptees were not better at perceiving the tone contrasts than their non-adopted Dutch peers, before or after training. This demonstrates that forgetting took place relatively soon after adoption, and that the re-exposure that the adoptees were presented with did not lead to an improvement greater than that of the Dutch control participants. Thus, the findings confirm what has been anecdotally reported by adoptees and their parents, but what had not been empirically tested before, namely that birth language forgetting occurs very soon after adoption
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