Sunday, May 18, 2025
5/18/2025
The Role of Environmental Context in Early Semantic Network Development - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Relationships between words organize children’s early vocabularies into interconnected semantic networks. The structure of these semantic networks, specifically how densely connected they are, predict cognitive skills that are central to later academic success, including vocabulary size and word recognition speed. That is, children whose vocabularies include more words that are semantically related to one another have stronger language skills later in life. Thus, to support successful language development outcomes, it is essential to understand (a) how toddlers begin to form semantic associations between individual words and (b) how they use these associations to organize their networks into interconnected clusters of related words. Previous work has explored the possibility that toddlers form semantic associations based on perceptual similarities between the objects that words refer to, as well as similarities in the linguistic structures in which words are used. However, these cues may not always be available and accessible to young word learners. An additional, unexplored possibility is that toddlers take advantage of a different type of cue—the environmental context in which they encounter words and objects, like the kitchen or the bathroom—to form semantic associations between words for objects that appear in the same contexts and to group objects that appear in the same context into semantic categories. Previous research suggests that caregivers systematically talk about semantically-related words in particular contexts (i.e., food-related words in the kitchen and hygiene-related words in the bathroom) and that toddlers remember the contexts in which they encounter words and objects. Despite the reliability and accessibility of environmental context as a cue to lexical associations, its role in semantic network development has not yet been examined. Specific Aim 1 of the proposed project will investigate whether young toddlers form semantic associations between novel words for objects that are encountered in the same environmental context. Specific Aim 2 will examine whether older toddlers can use environmental context to aggregate perceptually dissimilar objects together into broad categories of semantically-related objects. Finally, Specific Aim 3 will examine how individual differences in toddlers’ associations between words and particular environmental contexts are related to differences in the structure of their extant vocabularies. By examining the role of environmental context in semantic network development, the proposed project will incorporate environmental context into word learning theory. Additionally, the proposed work will examine a mechanistic account of semantic network development across toddlerhood, which will inform theories that encompass individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and could serve as a potential target for future language learning interventions. Training Plan. The training plan focuses on acquiring new methodological expertise in diverse experimental paradigms and individual differences measures, gaining theoretical knowledge in semantic development, mentoring junior researchers, completing advanced training in ethical and responsible conduct of research, and honing science communication skills.
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