Inbal Arnon

Biographic Data

ID1692197
NAMEInbal Arnon
GIVEN NAMESInbal
FAMILY NAMEArnon
SIGNATUREARNON I
AFFILIATIONSHebrew University of Jerusalem
ORCID0000-0001-8934-718X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS31
TOTAL CITATIONS98
AUTHOR COUNT30
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2006
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • Children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language

    Open AccessLucie Wolters, Simon Kirby et al.ARTICLECognition2026

    Learners are limited in how much they can learn when a language is passed from one generation to the next. This transmission bottleneck is thought to play a crucial role in shaping language by promoting the emergence of systematic structure that enhances learnability. Prior work has investigated the impact of transmission bottlenecks by experimentally manipulating how much input learners receive. However, in natural language learning, bottlenecks…

  • Enhancing second language learning through orthographical changes

    Open AccessInbal Kimchi, Noga Reshef et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2026

  • Skewed distributions facilitate infants' word segmentation

    Open AccessLucie Wolters, Mitsuhiko Ota et al.ARTICLECognition2025

  • Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning

    Open AccessLucie Wolters, Simon Kirby et al.ARTICLECognitive Science2025References: 60

    Language is passed across generations through cultural transmission. Prior experimental work, where participants reproduced sets of non‐linguistic sequences in transmission chains, shows that this process gives rise to two characteristic statistical properties of language that enhance its learnability: the statistical coherence of words and the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies. In this study, we extend this work in three ways. First, we r…

  • The child’s “or” construction

    Open AccessMira Ariel, Inbal Arnon et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Communication2024

    “Or” is associated, in Gricean approaches, with the readings Inclusive (“at least one, and possibly both, options are true”) and Exclusive (“exactly one option is true”). Empirical findings show adults favoring Exclusive readings; but for children, the literature yields puzzling results. Laboratory comprehension tasks suggest children favor Inclusive, but naturalistic evidence suggests children’s “or” productions are overwhelmingly Exclusive. We …

  • Infant-directed speech becomes less redundant as infants grow

    Open AccessShira TAL, Eitan Grossman et al.ARTICLECognition2024

    Do speakers use less redundant language with more proficient interlocutors? Both the communicative efficiency framework and the language development literature predict that speech directed to younger infants should be more redundant than speech directed to older infants. Here, we test this by quantifying redundancy in infant-directed speech using entropy rate - an information-theoretic measure reflecting average degree of repetitiveness. While ID…

  • Zipfian distributions facilitate children's learning of novel word-referent mappings

    Open AccessLucie Wolters, Ori Lavi-Rotbain et al.ARTICLECognition2024

  • Does Early Unit Size Impact the Formation of Linguistic Predictions? Grammatical Gender as a Case Study

    Open AccessRana Abu‐zhaya, Inbal ArnonARTICLELanguage Learning2024References: 47

    Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun associations with either segmented input first or unsegmented input first, and tested their learning…

  • Zipfian Distributions in Child-Directed Speech

    Open AccessOri Lavi-Rotbain, Inbal ArnonARTICLEOpen MIND2023

    Across languages, word frequency and rank follow a power law relation, forming a distribution known as the Zipfian distribution. There is growing experimental evidence that this well-studied phenomenon may be beneficial for language learning. However, most investigations of word distributions in natural language have focused on adult-to-adult speech: Zipf’s law has not been thoroughly evaluated in child-directed speech (CDS) across languages. If …

  • Speakers use more redundant references with language learners

    Open AccessShira TAL, Eitan Grossman et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2023

    According to the communicative efficiency hypothesis, speakers should produce more linguistic material when comprehension difficulty increases. Here, we investigate a potential source of comprehension difficulty – listeners’ language proficiency – on speakers’ productions, using referential choice as a case study. Referential choice is influenced by communicative efficiency: pronouns are used less than full noun phrases (NPs) for less predictable…

  • Evidence of Zipfian distributions in three sign languages

    Open AccessInbal Kimchi, Lucie Wolters et al.ARTICLEGesture2023Cited by: 2References: 9

    One striking commonality between languages is their Zipfian distributions: A power-law distribution of word frequency. This distribution is found across languages, speech genres, and within different parts of speech. The recurrence of such distributions is thought to reflect cognitive and/or communicative pressures and to facilitate language learning. However, research on Zipfian distributions has mostly been limited to spoken languages. In this …

  • The learnability consequences of Zipfian distributions in language

    Open AccessOri Lavi-Rotbain, Inbal ArnonARTICLECognition2022

  • Redundancy can benefit learning

    Open AccessShira TAL, Inbal ArnonARTICLECognition2022

  • Visual statistical learning is facilitated in Zipfian distributions

    Open AccessOri Lavi-Rotbain, Inbal ArnonARTICLECognition2021

  • ‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases

    Open AccessBarbora Skarabela, Mitsuhiko Ota et al.ARTICLECognition2021

  • The Starting Big approach to language learning

    Open AccessInbal ArnonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2021

    The study of language acquisition has a long and contentious history: researchers disagree on what drives this process, the relevant data, and the interesting questions. Here, I outline the Starting Big approach to language learning, which emphasizes the role of multiword units in language, and of coarse-to-fine processes in learning. I outline core predictions and supporting evidence. In short, the approach argues that multiword units are integr…

  • The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Ramya Maitreyee et al.ARTICLECognition2020

    This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the m…

  • A learning bias for word order harmony

    Open AccessJennifer Culbertson, Julie Franck et al.ARTICLECognition2020

    Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments repor…

  • Starting Big

    Naomi Havron, Inbal ArnonPREPRINT2020

    Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two core p…

  • Starting Big

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Inbal ArnonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2020

    Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement better when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two…

  • SES effects on the use of variation sets in child-directed speech

    Open AccessShira TAL, Inbal ArnonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    Socio-economic status (SES) impacts the amount and type of input children hear in ways that have developmental consequences. Here, we examine the effect of SES on the use of variation sets (successive utterances with partial self-repetitions) in child-directed speech (CDS). Variation sets have been found to facilitate language learning, but have been studied only in higher-SES groups. Here, we examine their use in naturalistic speech in two langu…

  • Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Limor Raviv et al.ARTICLEJournal of Cultural Cognitive…2018Cited by: 1References: 54

  • Minding the gaps

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Inbal ArnonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2017

    Can emergent literacy impact the size of the linguistic units children attend to? We examined children's ability to segment multiword sequences before and after they learned to read, in order to disentangle the effect of literacy and age on segmentation. We found that early readers were better at segmenting multiword units (after controlling for age, cognitive, and linguistic variables), and that improvement in literacy skills between the two ses…

  • What can frequency effects tell us about the building blocks and mechanisms of language learning

    Open AccessInbal ArnonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

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  • “Piensa” twice

    Open AccessAlbert Costa, Alice Foucart et al.ARTICLECognition2014