It's All in the Interaction: Early Acquired Words Are Both Frequent and Highly Imageable.

Prior studies have found that children are more likely to learn words that are frequent in the input and highly imageable. Many theories of word learning, however, predict that these variables should interact, particularly early in development: frequency of a form is of little use if you cannot infer its meaning, and a concrete word cannot be acquired if you never hear it. The present study explores this interaction, how it changes over time and its relationship to syntactic category effects in children acquiring American English. We analyzed 1461 monolingual English-speaking children aged 1;4-2;6 from the MB-CDI norming study (Fenson et al., 1994). Word frequency was estimated from the CHILDES database, and imageability was measured using adult ratings. There was a strong over-additive interaction between frequency and imageability, such that children were more likely to learn a word if it was both highly imageable and very frequent. This interaction was larger in younger children than in older children. There were reliable differences between syntactic categories independent of frequency and imageability, which did not interact with age. These findings are consistent with theories in which children's early words are acquired by mapping frequent word forms onto concrete, perceptually available referents, such that highly frequent items are only acquired if they are also imageable, and vice versa.

Domain-general conflict monitoring predicts neural and behavioral indices of linguistic error processing during reading comprehension.

The ability to detect and respond to linguistic errors is critical for successful reading comprehension, but these skills can vary considerably across readers. In the current study, healthy adults (age 18-35) read short discourse scenarios for comprehension while monitoring for the presence of semantic anomalies. Using a factor analytic approach, we examined if performance in nonlinguistic conflict monitoring tasks (Stroop, AX-CPT) would predict individual differences in neural and behavioral measures of linguistic error processing. Consistent with this hypothesis, domain-general conflict monitoring predicted both readers' end-of-trial acceptability judgments and the amplitude of a late neural response (the P600) evoked by linguistic anomalies. The influence on the P600 was nonlinear, suggesting that online neural responses to linguistic errors are influenced by both the effectiveness and efficiency of domain-general conflict monitoring. These relationships were also highly specific and remained after controlling for variability in working memory capacity and verbal knowledge. Finally, we found that domain-general conflict monitoring also predicted individual variability in measures of reading comprehension, and that this relationship was partially mediated by behavioral measures of linguistic error detection. These findings inform our understanding of the role of domain-general executive functions in reading comprehension, with potential implications for the diagnosis and treatment of language impairments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).