The effects of learning and retrieval contexts on cross-situational word learning

Abstract

Natural linguistic environments usually provide structured input, in that words that are semantically-related are likely to occur in the same situation. The current study examined whether this kind of semantically-themed structure facilitated cross-situational word learning. Results from two experiments consistently showed that participants had higher performance in semantically-themed learning contexts. In contrast, themed retrieval contexts did not affect performance. Our work suggests that learners’ ability to use statistical information to acquire word-to-object mappings is enhanced when learning is put in a more naturalistic and structured context.

Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational word learning

“…Recent cross-situational learning studies have shown that adults who encountered novel nouns in themed referential contexts where all of the objects were from the same category (e.g., animals, clothing, things in the kitchen) retained more information about the potential referents for each word across observations (Dautriche & Chemla, 2014) and demonstrated higher rates of word learning (Chen & Yu, 2015;Dautriche & Chemla, 2014) than did adults who encountered the same nouns in non-themed contexts involving unrelated objects. Moreover, the advantage of themed over non-themed contexts held even when the former involved greater competition between referents because individual distracter referents co-occurred more frequently with the target (Chen & Yu, 2015). Together, these results suggest that encountering words in semantically coherent or themed contexts facilitates adults' encoding and retrieval of potential referents, and this offsets the challenges imposed by competition.…”