Learning abstract words and concepts: insights from developmental language disorder.

Publisher: Royal Society Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 7503623 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1471-2970 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 09628436 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: London : Royal Society, 1934-

Concept Formation* ; Language Development* ; Learning* ; Semantics* ; Vocabulary*; Language Development Disorders/*psychology; Adolescent ; Child ; England ; Female ; Humans ; Male

Some explanations of abstract word learning suggest that these words are learnt primarily from the linguistic input, using statistical co-occurrences of words in language, whereas concrete words can also rely on non-linguistic, experiential information. According to this hypothesis, we expect that, if the learner is not able to fully exploit the information in the linguistic input, abstract words should be affected more than concrete ones. Embodied approaches instead argue that both abstract and concrete words can rely on experiential information and, therefore, there might not be any linguistic primacy. Here, we test the role of linguistic input in the development of abstract knowledge with children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children aged 8-13. We show that DLD children, who by definition have impoverished language, do not show a disproportionate impairment for abstract words in lexical decision and definition tasks. These results indicate that linguistic information does not have a primary role in the learning of abstract concepts and words; rather, it would play a significant role in semantic development across all domains of knowledge.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.
(© 2018 The Author(s).)

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Keywords: abstract concepts; developmental language disorder; distributional semantics; language acquisition; semantic representation; vocabulary development

Date Created: 20180620 Date Completed: 20190429 Latest Revision: 20190805

20221213

PMC6015818

10.1098/rstb.2017.0140

29915008