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@inproceedings{meylanmankewitz2021lexicalambiguity,
author = {Meylan*, <NAME> <NAME>.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
title = {Quantifying Lexical Ambiguity in Speech To and From English-Learning Children},
year = {2021},
psyarxiv = {zxkm2},
osf = {9uqrv},
abstract = {Because words have multiple meanings, language users must often choose appropriate meanings according to the context of use.
How this potential ambiguity affects first language learning, especially word learning, is unknown.
Here, we present the first large-scale study of how children are exposed to, and themselves use, ambiguous words in their language learning environments.
We tag 180,000 words in two longitudinal child language corpora with word senses from WordNet, focusing between 9 and 51 months and limiting to words from a popular parental vocabulary report.
We then compare the diversity of sense usage in adult speech around children to that observed in a sample of adult language, as well as the diversity of sense usage in children's own productions.
To accomplish this we use a Bayesian model-based estimate of sense entropy, a measure of diversity that takes into account uncertainty inherent in small sample sizes.
This reveals that sense diversity in caregivers' speech to children is similar to that observed in a sample of adult-directed written material, and that children's use of nouns---but not verbs---is similarly diverse to that of adults.
Finally, we show that sense entropy is a significant predictor of vocabulary development: children begin to produce words with a higher diversity of adult sense usage at later ages.
We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of word learning.},
category = {conference proceedings}}

@inproceedings{zettersten2021peekbank,
author = {<NAME> <NAME> <NAME> <NAME> <NAME>.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
title = {Peekbank: Exploring children’s word recognition through an open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data},
year = {2021},
psyarxiv = {ep693},
osf = {pr6wu},
abstract = {The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents in context is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We present two analyses of the current database (N=1,320): (1) capturing age-related changes in infants' word recognition while generalizing across item-level variability and (2) assessing how a central methodological decision -- selecting the time window of analysis -- impacts the reliability of measurement. Future efforts will expand the scope of the current database to advance our understanding of participant-level and item-level variation in children's vocabulary development.},
category = {conference proceedings}}
