Eighteen-month-olds learn novel words through overhearing

Abstract

The prototypical word learning situation in western, middle-class cultures is dyadic: an adult addresses a child directly, ideally in a manner sensitive to their current focus of attention. But young children also seem to learn many of their words in polyadic situations through overhearing. Extending the previous work of Akhtar and colleagues, in the current two studies we gave 18-month-old infants opportunities to acquire novel words through overhearing in situations that were a bit more complex: they did not socially interact with the adult who used the new word before the word learning situation began, and the way the adult used the new word was less transparent in that it was neither a naming nor a directive speech act. In both studies, infants learned words equally well (and above chance) whether they were directly addressed or had to eavesdrop on two adults. Almost from the beginning, young children employ diverse learning strategies for acquiring new words.

Neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants’ social learning

“…However, it is consistent with evidence showing that infants are astute observers of others' actions, even when not directly engaged with them. For example, infants readily learn words by “overhearing” conversations between others in laboratory experiments (Floor & Akhtar, 2006, Gampe, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2012, Shneidman, Sootsman-Buresh, Shimpi, Knight-Schwartz, & Woodward, 2009). Moreover, in many cultural communities, infants and young children spend a great deal of time observing, and learning from, the actions of others who are not interacting with them (Chavajay & Rogoff, 1999, Gaskins, 1999; Gaskins & Paradise, 2010).…”

Linguistic Input, Electronic Media, and Communication Outcomes of Toddlers With Hearing Loss

“…This concept is supported by several word-learning studies indicating that children who are HH require more exposures to a word than children with NH to add it to their lexicon (Lederberg et al 2000; Stelmachowicz et al 2004; Pittman et al 2005; Lederberg & Spencer 2009). Additionally, children who are HH have difficulty accessing linguistic input when the speaker is at a distance, which results in these children having less access to overheard speech than children with NH who can utilize this route for word learning by 18 months of age (Gampe et al 2012). This indicates that linguistic input within conversational interactions (during which the parent and child are likely to be located in close proximity to one another) may be especially critical for this population.…”

Incidental vocabulary acquisition from stories: Second and fourth graders learn more from listening than reading

“…For most of these first six years, it is likely that children acquire most of their words through mechanisms such as joint attention and overhearing (Gampe, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2012). Even if a five-year-old were to spend 30 minutes a day reading books or being read to, this would only constitute 3.13% of a 16-hour waking day.…”