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Exploring Patterns of Stability and Change in Caregivers' Word Usage Across Early Childhood
Author(s) -
Jiang Hang,
Frank Michael C.,
Kulkarni Vivek,
Fourtassi Abdellah
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.13177
Subject(s) - psychology , language development , leverage (statistics) , word (group theory) , early childhood , cognitive psychology , language acquisition , age of acquisition , developmental psychology , linguistics , computer science , cognition , artificial intelligence , philosophy , mathematics education , neuroscience
The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child‐directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co‐occurrence. Previous work using these models has not measured how these patterns may change throughout development, however. In this work, we leverage natural language processing methods—originally developed to study historical language change—to compare caregivers' use of words when talking to younger versus older children. Some words' usage changed more than others; this variability could be predicted based on the word's properties at both the individual and category levels. These findings suggest that caregivers' changing patterns of word use may play a role in scaffolding children's acquisition of conceptual structure in early development.