Publications [#366000] of Elika Bergelson

Journal Articles

1. Moore, C; Bergelson, E (2021). Wordform variability in infants' language environment and its effects on early word learning. [doi]
   (last updated on 2024/04/22)

   Abstract:
   

   Traditional views of language development suggest that noun learning involves creating a one-to-one mapping between concrete objects and their labels. In the current work, we provide evidence that real world language input to infants does not provide such tidy mappings. Instead, infants encounter many variant wordforms for familiar nouns(e.g. dog∼doggy∼dogs). We explore this wordform variability in 44 English-learning infants’ naturalistic environments using a longitudinal corpus of infant-available speech. We looked at both the frequency and composition of wordform variability. We found two broad categories of variability: morpheme-adding changes, where words were pluralized or compounded (e.g. coat∼raincoats); and wordplay, where words changed form without any associated change in meaning (e.g. bird∼birdie). Wordplay occured with a limited number of lemmas that were usually early-learned, highly-frequent, and shorter. When looking at all wordform variability, we found that individual words with higher levels of wordform variability were learned earlier than words with fewer wordforms, over and above the effect of frequency.