Testing a word is not a test of word learning

Abstract

Although vocabulary acquisition requires children learn names for multiple things, many investigations of word learning mechanisms teach children the name for only one of the objects presented. This is problematic because it is unclear whether children's performance reflects recall of the correct word-object association or simply selection of the only object that was singled out by being the only object named.Children introduced to one novel name may perform at ceiling as they are not required to discriminate on the basis of the name per se, and appear to rapidly learn words following minimal exposure to a single word. We introduced children to four novel objects. For half the children, only one of the objects was named and for the other children, all four objects were named. Only children introduced to one word reliably selected the target object at test. This demonstration highlights the oversimplicity of one-word learning paradigms and the need for a shift in word learning paradigms where more than one word is taught to ensure children disambiguate objects on the basis of their names rather than their degree of salience. Not A Test of Learning 3 Testing a Word is Not a Test of Word Learning

Goodnight book: sleep consolidation improves word learning via storybooks

“…Overall, children's novel name recall and retention accuracy was significantly better than expected by chance (0.25) for each condition at each test, all p s < 0.01 (all of our reported t -tests are two-tailed), see Figure 2. However, some of the test alternatives were never-before-seen novel objects (see e.g., Werchan and Gómez, 2014), which may have made the test easier than desired (Axelsson and Horst, 2013b). Recall, half of the trials children received included three novel distractors and half of the trials included the other target as a competitor along with two novel distractors.…”

All Tapped Out: Touchscreen Interactivity and Young Children’s Word Learning

“…However, language researchers point out that making initial word-object associations is not the same as forming an enduring, rich understanding of a word that allows a child to generalize that word’s meaning to novel exemplars (Werker et al, 1998; Horst and Samuelson, 2008; Axelsson and Horst, 2013; Bion et al, 2013; Zosh et al, 2013). …”

“…Following the convention in many word learning studies, we included four novel object-label learning trials, as children of this age can learn up to four words per day (Axelsson and Horst, 2013). …”

The Novel Object and Unusual Name (NOUN) Database: A collection of novel images for use in experimental research

“…Novel objects are useful for a variety of research designs (e.g., Axelsson & Horst, 2013Kwon et al, 2014) and multiple exemplars of novel objects may be useful for categorization (e.g., Homa et al, 2011;Twomey et al, 2014), memory (Hout & Goldinger, 2010 and perception (e.g., Cunningham & Wolfe, 2014;Hout & Goldinger, 2015) experiments.…”