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Sander, J., Çetinçelik, M., Zhang, Y., Rowland, C. F., & Harmon, Z. (2024). Why does joint attention predict vocabulary acquisition? The answer depends on what coding scheme you use. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1607-1613).Abstract
Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes— one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size. -
Harmon, Z., & Kapatsinski, V. (2015). Studying the dynamics of lexical access using disfluencies. In R. Lickley, & R. Eklund (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS 2015) (pp. 41-44).Abstract
Faced with planning problems related to lexical access, speakers take advantage of a major function of disfluencies: buying time. It is reasonable, then, to expect that the structure of disfluencies sheds light on the mechanisms underlying lexical access. Using data from the Switchboard Corpus, we investigated the effect of semantic competition during lexical access on repetition disfluencies. We hypothesized that the more time the speaker needs to access the following unit, the longer the repetition. We examined the repetitions preceding verbs and nouns and tested predictors influencing the accessibility of these items. Results suggest that speed of lexical access negatively correlates with the length of repetition and that the main determinants of lexical access speed differ for verbs and nouns. Longer disfluencies before verbs appear to be due to significant paradigmatic competition from semantically similar verbs. For nouns, they occur when the noun is relatively unpredictable given the preceding context.
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