erinecampbell.bsky.social
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Now check out the paper!!
📖Paper: ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...
📊Data: osf.io/dcnq6/
💻Code: github.com/BergelsonLab...
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Maybe blind children are doing something different with the language input 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️ (underspecified, I know)
Maybe language input supports language development regardless of vision status, but without vision, it takes a little longer to derive meaning from language input.
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Back to the present paper!
My interpretation?
The input doesn’t look *that* different.
I don’t feel compelled by the explanation that parents of blind children talk to them in some special magic way that allows them to overcome initial language delays.
So then what?
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Links to those two papers ⬇️
🐠 Deep dive into vocabulary in blind toddlers: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
👻 Production of "imperceptible" words (in my own biased opinion, this one is a banger)
direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
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Btw, in other work: blind toddlers are less likely than to say visual words
An effect that is specific to words that are exclusively visual (and don’t really have a auditory/ tactile/olfactory/etc association)
But!! Blind children still do produce words like “blue” or “see” as early as 16 months!
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I expected differences in these "visual" words:
🌟 Maybe parents of blind kiddos would use them more? (giving extra visual description)
🌟 Maybe parents of blind kids would use them less? (instead talking about sounds or textures, idk)
Nope! Similar.
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Lastly, what do parents talk about?
Based on verb tense, we found that parents of blind kids seem to talk more about past, future, and hypothetical events than parents of sighted kids
We saw no difference in the amount that parents used highly-visual words (see, mirror, blue, sky)
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Is input to blind kids more lexically diverse or morphosyntactically complex?
No and no: Similar MLU and TTR across groups.
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Do blind and sighted kids differ in the amount of interaction?
Nope! Blind and sighted kids participate in a similar number of conversational turns and get a similar amount of speech directed *to* them (as opposed to directed to adults, etc.)
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First, do parents of blind children talk more?
Nope! Doesn’t seem to matter if we measure it with LENA’s automated word count (left) or by counting the words in our transcriptions (right). Kids vary a lot in the number of words they hear, but that doesn’t vary by group.
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Next, a 7-year annotation effort: small army of RAs from @bergelsonlab.bsky.social transcribed 40 minutes per recording
→ 1200 minutes of fully transcribed speech, ~ 65000 words
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If that sample sounds small, know that I am patting myself on the back for even reaching fifteen!
(This involved driving hours to homes, yoga classes…mailing recorders to families during the pandemic and becoming close friends with the Durham Pack & Ship…)
actual photo of me 4th year grad school
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15 blind infants wore LENA recorders for a day to capture language input in their daily lives.
We matched each blind participant to a sighted participant based on age, gender, maternal ed., and number of siblings in the household.
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It's bonkers that in academic science we spend hours obsessing over the wording of a paper, but often only one person has seen the code that produced the results! 2/N
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I also just picked up Word Hord!!
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I am so excited for this!!!
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thank you!!!
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📰 Campbell, Sevcikova Sehyr, Pontecorvo, Cohen-Goldberg, Emmorey & Caselli (2025)
“Iconicity as an Organizing Principle of the Lexicon”
Now out in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
📂 Data + code: osf.io/5y6s4/
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And thanks also to the deaf community whose language continues to expand our understanding of how all human language works 🌈
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Thanks to our collaborators @zedsehyr.bsky.social, @elanajp.bsky.social, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, @kemmorey.bsky.social, and @naomicaselli.bsky.social, at @buwheelock.bsky.social, Chapman University, @tufts.edu, and @sdsuresearch.bsky.social
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Which brings me to my next point!!
What consequences might these systematic phonological/semantic patterns have for acquisition and processing?
I don't know yet, but I do think it's time to start considering the *non*-arbitrariness of language more seriously in our theorizing.
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Also, semantic similarity data came from free association tasks (for ASL, led by @naomicaselli.bsky.social and @elanajp.bsky.social. for English & Spanish, from @smallworldofwords.bsky.social)
Some of these associations seem phonological rather than semantic
(lookin' at u: 🧙♂️wizard - 🦎 lizard)
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But honestly, these were hard to tease apart from each other.
🔮 When is systematicity driven by shared word origin vs. inflection vs. iconicity?
🔮 Does iconicity behave morphologically?
🔮 What is morphology?? Does anyone know??
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Still, in English and Spanish, we definitely see some iconic clusters:
🔊 pop–bop–beep
🗣️ squeal–squeak–squawk
We also see clusters that look more like morphology:
🏆win–won
👩🔬físico–químico
Or etymology:
🗽plastic–plaster
🪷apatía–simpatía
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These aren't isolated cases: Over half of the ASL lexicon shows this pattern!
ASL’s lexicon showed densely-connected iconic clusters—unlike English and Spanish, which had fewer and smaller pockets of form-meaning alignment.
(In the graph below, magenta are iconic signs and aqua are non-iconic)
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👻 Emptiness signs (EMPTY, INVISIBLE, VANISH) share handshape
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In ASL, this effect is especially pronounced. Signs that look alike also mean similar things, *especially* when they’re iconic.
For example:
🌧️ Weather signs (WIND, CLOUD, RAIN) are made with two open hands in the space in front of the signer's body
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Answer: Yes!! across all 3 languages, when words are iconic they’re more likely to be similar to other words in both pronunciation and meaning.
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We asked: Do semantically related words tend to be phonologically related—and is this stronger when those words are iconic?
We computed semantic, phonological, and iconicity scores for millions of word pairs to detect language-wide patterns in ASL, English, and Spanish.
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Previous studies have shown that:
• Iconicity is more widespread than once thought
• Most languages show systematicity
(For example, in English: ✨ glitter, glisten, glimpse ✨)
In this paper, we show they’re connected:
👉 Iconicity helps explain patterns of systematicity.
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So anyway, big thank you to everyone who helped work through this theoretically and analytically and also emotionally (@cpdavis.bsky.social, @mzettersten.bsky.social , @derekhouston.bsky.social , @naomicaselli.bsky.social , @bergelsonlab.bsky.social).
The paper’s out! Go read it! 👟👟
11/11
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And for vocab data for our typically-sighted/hearing matches? Wordbank!!! wordbank.stanford.edu
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