24-month-olds' selective learning is not an all-or-none phenomenon (original) (raw)
Related papers
Preschoolers’ selective learning is guided by the principle of relevance
Cognition, 2013
We investigate whether preschoolers' word learning is selectively attuned to learning word-referent links that they expect will be relevant to their everyday communicative contexts. In two studies, 4-year-olds were taught the name of an unfamiliar toy that they were told was purchased either nearby or faraway. Children's memory for the link was assessed either by a speaker who was not present when it was taught or by the same speaker who taught it to them. Children who were told that the toys were from nearby learned the word-referent link, whereas children who were told the toys were from faraway did not. Our findings suggest that 4-year-olds' word learning is ''attuned to relevance'' -they selectively acquire new word meanings that will have communicative utility in their linguistic community. These findings provide the first evidence that children's selective word learning is driven by an overarching principle of prospective relevance.
Word-object associations are non-selective in infants and young children
Cognitive Science, 2017
For decades, theories of early word learning have assumed that infants are equipped with learning biases that help them learn words at a fast pace. One of these biases, called Mutual Exclusivity, suggests that infants reject second labels for name-known objects. Our first two experiments, with children and with infants, suggest that novelty preference during Mutual Exclusivity tasks should not be taken as evidence that associations between novel labels and name-known objects have not taken place. A third experiment, supplemented with computational modeling, ruled out cascaded activation patterns as alternative explanations and, instead, confirmed that word-object associations are non-selective throughout infancy and childhood.
Frontiers in psychology, 2015
When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions. In one session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were in the children's productive vocabularies, and in the other session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were only in the children's receptive vocabularies. Results indicated that children at all three ages were more likely to exclude a familiar object as the potential referent of the novel word if they could comprehend and produce its name rather than comprehend its name only. In...
Infants' Learning about Words and Sounds in Relation to Objects
Child Development, 1999
In acquiring language, babies learn not only that people can communicate about objects and events, but also that they typically use a particular kind of act as the communicative signal. The current studies asked whether 1-year-olds' learning of names during joint attention is guided by the expectation that names will be in the form of spoken words. In the first study, 13-month-olds were introduced to either a novel word or a novel sound-producing action (using a small noisemaker). Both the word and the sound were produced by a researcher as she showed the baby a new toy during a joint attention episode. The baby's memory for the link between the word or sound and the object was tested in a multiple choice procedure. Thirteen-month-olds learned both the word-object and sound-object correspondences, as evidenced by their choosing the target reliably in response to hearing the word or sound on test trials, but not on control trials when no word or sound was present. In the second study, 13-month-olds, but not 20-month-olds, learned a new sound-object correspondence. These results indicate that infants initially accept a broad range of signals in communicative contexts and narrow the range with development.
Although we know much about the conditions under which children demonstrate selective social learning, we have a limited understanding of the cognitive mechanisms by which children's selectivity manifests. Here, we report findings from a brain electro-physiological (ERP) study designed to determine the extent to which words presented by ignorant speakers were later both familiar to children and associated with semantic meaning. Forty-eight children (mean age = 6.5 years) first experienced novel word training from either a knowledgeable or an ignorant speaker. Children's ERPs were subsequently recorded as they heard a recording of the speaker using the novel word, followed by a picture of either the object the word was paired with during training (congruent) or a distractor object that was also present during training (incongruent). Children trained by a knowledgeable speaker showed both N200 and N400 effects to the incongruent word–referent pairings, thereby suggesting that the novel words were both familiar and bore a semantic association. In contrast, children trained by an ignorant speaker demonstrated only the N200 effect, thereby suggesting that the word– referent links were familiar, but not associated with semantic meaning. These findings provide evidence that selective word learning involves the disruption of processes specifically associated with semantic consolidation of word learning events. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • We used a combined word training–event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying chil-dren's selective word learning. • Children who were trained novel word–referent links by an ignorant speaker demonstrated ERP evidence indicating that they had encoded the word–referent links, but did not associate semantic meaning to these links. • In contrast, children who were trained by a knowledgeable speaker demonstrated ERP evidence indicating that they had encoded and associated semantic meaning to the novel word–referent links. • These findings suggest that children's selective word learning involves the disruption of processes specifically associated with the semantic consolidation of word learning events.
A Learned Label Modulates Object Representations in 10-Month-Old Infants
2016
Despite substantial evidence for a bidirectional relationship between language and representation, the roots of this relationship in infancy are not known. The current study explores the possibility that labels may affect object representations at the earliest stages of language acquisition. We asked parents to play with their 10-month-old infants with two novel toys for three minutes, every day for a week, teaching infants a novel word for one toy but not the other. After a week infants participated in a familiarization task in which they saw each object for 8 trials in silence, followed by a test trial consisting of both objects accompanied by the trained word. Infants exhibited a faster decline in looking times to the previously unlabeled object. These data speak to the current debate over the status of labels in human cognition, supporting accounts in which labels are an integral part of representation.
Familiarity plays a small role in noun comprehension at 12–18 months
Infancy, 2020
Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with particular items, each of which is representative of a broader category that often shares perceptual features. Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels to new category members. While young infants have been found to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study compares 12-to 18-month-olds' word comprehension in the context of pairs of their own items (e.g., photographs of their own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same category (e.g., a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate previous work showing that noun comprehension improves rapidly over the second year, while also suggesting that item familiarity appears to play a far smaller role in comprehension in this age range. This in turn suggests that even before age 2, ready generalization beyond particular experiences is an intrinsic component of lexical development.
Knowing How You Know: Toddlers Reevaluate Words Learned From an Unreliable Speaker
Open Mind
There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and reevaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig & Woodward, 2010 ): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learned words from a speaker who has previously revealed themself as reliable (correctly labeling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeler (incorrectly labeling familiar objects). Experiment 2 then provided the critical test for source monitoring: children first learned novel words from a speaker before watching that speaker labeling familiar objects correctly or incorrectly. Children who were exposed to the reliable speaker were significantly more likely to ...
Infants' disambiguation of novel object words
First Language, 1998
When preschool-aged children are presented with two objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and asked for the referent of a novel word, they will consistently map the novel word to the novel object, a tendency called the disambiguation effect. In this study, we examined the relation between vocabulary size and the disambiguation response tendency during late infancy. Sixteen- to 22-month-old infants were presented with a novel object along with two familiar objects and asked to choose the referents of familiar and novel words. The infants who consistently chose the novel object in the presence of a novel word had significantly higher productive vocabularies than those who did not. These two groups, however, did not differ in age or on familiar word trials. These results suggest that emergence of the disambiguation effect in late infancy is related to productive vocabulary size rather than age.