Young children’s referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions

Dysart, Erin L.; Mather, Emily; Riggs, Kevin J.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.003

Cited by 17 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The longitudinal assessment of ME use across two ages presented in this study sheds light on the transition of ME from a default assumption in referent selection tasks, which is possibly grounded in general attentional biases (Dysart et al., ; Hollich et al., ; Pruden et al., ; Samuelson et al., ), to a sophisticated word‐learning assumption or strategy moulded by the child's individual lexical knowledge and linguistic experience. This dynamic view of ME has been postulated for monolingual infants (McMurray et al., ; Samuelson et al., ; Samuelson & McMurray, ), whereby their initial tendency to attend to a novel object when presented with a novel label, regardless of whether a familiar competitor is present or not (Horst et al., ; Mather & Plunkett, ), becomes more constrained with the growth of their specific (Grassmann et al., ) and abstract (Graham et al., ; Kalashnikova, Mattock et al., ) vocabulary knowledge.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…The capacity to reason by exclusivity in tasks testing the disambiguation effect has been ascribed to general attentional biases that are not specific to the process of lexical acquisition (Dysart, Mather, & Riggs, ; Hollich et al., ; Horst, Samuelson, Kucker, & McMurray, ; Samuelson, Kucker, & Spencer, ; Samuelson & McMurray, ). For example, infants as young as 10 months select novel instead of familiar objects in response to novel labels based on biases to attentionally salient (Pruden, Hirsh‐Pasek, Golinkoff, & Hennon, ) and novel objects (Mather & Plunkett, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The development of fast‐mapping and novel word retention strategies in monolingual and bilingual infants

Kalashnikova

Escudero

Kidd

2018

Developmental Science

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The mutual exclusivity (ME) assumption is proposed to facilitate early word learning by guiding infants to map novel words to novel referents. This study assessed the emergence and use of ME to both disambiguate and retain the meanings of novel words across development in 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual children (Experiment 1; N = 58), and in a sub-group of these children again at 24 months of age (Experiment 2: N = 32). Both monolinguals and bilinguals employed ME to select the referent of a novel label to a similar extent at 18 and 24 months. At 18 months, there were also no differences in novel word retention between the two language-background groups. However, at 24 months, only monolinguals showed the ability to retain these label-object mappings. These findings indicate that the development of the ME assumption as a reliable word-learning strategy is shaped by children's individual language exposure and experience with language use.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of fast‐mapping and novel word retention strategies in monolingual and bilingual infants

Kalashnikova

Escudero

Kidd

2018

Developmental Science

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“…The general consensus in the literature to-date appears to be that, at later ages, from around 3 to 4 years, there are few differences in children’s ability to fast-map novel word-object and action-object associations [6, 13, 14]. Riggs, Mather, Hyde, and Simpson showed that a) 3- to 4-year-old children choose a novel object relative to a familiar object when presented with a novel action or a novel word, b) retain the action-object association and extend it to other members of the object category as they do with words, and c) distinguish between a previously familiarized novel-action-object mapping and an unfamiliar novel-action-object mapping, showing that they had formed a detailed representation of the novel action presented [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word-object and action-object association learning across early development

et al. 2019

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Successful communication often involves comprehension of both spoken language and observed actions with and without objects. Even very young infants can learn associations between actions and objects as well as between words and objects. However, in daily life, children are usually confronted with both kinds of input simultaneously. Choosing the critical information to attend to in such situations might help children structure the input, and thereby, allow for successful learning. In the current study, we therefore, investigated the developmental time course of children's and adults' word and action learning when given the opportunity to learn both word-object and action-object associations for the same object. All participants went through a learning phase and a test phase. In the learning phase, they were presented with two novel objects which were associated with a distinct novel name (e.g., "Look, a Tanu") and a distinct novel action (e.g., moving up and down while tilting sideways). In the test phase, participants were presented with both objects on screen in a baseline phase, then either heard one of the two labels or saw one of the two actions in a prime phase, and then saw the two objects again on screen in a recognition phase. Throughout the trial, participants' target looking was recorded to investigate whether participants looked at the target object upon hearing its label or seeing its action, and thus, would show learning of the word-object and action-object associations. Growth curve analyses revealed that 12month-olds showed modest learning of action-object associations, 36-month-olds learned word-object associations, and adults learned word-object and action-object associations. These results highlight how children attend to the different information types from the two modalities through which communication is addressed to them. Over time, with increased exposure to systematic word-object mappings, children attend less to action-object mappings, with the latter potentially being mediated by word-object learning even in adulthood. Thus, choosing between different kinds of input that may be more relevant in their rich environment encompassing different modalities might help learning at different points in development.

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“…Some studies have shown that exclusion learning is controlled by rejection of the defined comparison stimulus (e.g., Dixon, 1977;Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010;Markman et al, 2003). There is also evidence that participants relate the undefined sample and comparison on the exclusion trials based on novelty (Dysart, Mather, & Riggs, 2016). Further, both kinds of control can simultaneously influence exclusion-task performance (Wilkinson & McIlvane, 1997).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formation of new stimulus equivalence classes by exclusion

Plazas

Villamil

2018

J Exper Analysis Behavior

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This study presents three experiments that aimed to show the formation of stimulus equivalence relations among stimuli that had been previously related only by exclusion. In Experiment 1, participants were trained on baseline conditional discriminations to establish two 3-member equivalence classes. Then, they were exposed to exclusion trials, without feedback, in which undefined stimuli had to be matched by rejecting the defined baseline stimuli. Finally, participants responded to test trials evaluating the emergence of symmetry and transitivity among the undefined stimuli from the exclusion trials. For half of the participants, the stimuli related by exclusion were introduced as S- stimuli in the baseline trials, whereas for the other half they were not. Further, half of the participants were assessed for emergent relations with stimuli from all the classes, whereas the other half was assessed for emergent relations with only the stimuli related by exclusion. In Experiment 2, the S- comparisons in the emergent relations test trials with stimuli only related by exclusion were stimuli from a null class. In Experiment 3, the number of exclusion trials was doubled. Across experiments, most participants showed emergence of equivalence relations among the stimuli related by exclusion. Some conditions of stimulus control associated with exclusion learning and the emergence of equivalence relations are discussed.

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Young children’s referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions

Cited by 17 publications

References 22 publications

The development of fast‐mapping and novel word retention strategies in monolingual and bilingual infants

The development of fast‐mapping and novel word retention strategies in monolingual and bilingual infants

Word-object and action-object association learning across early development

Formation of new stimulus equivalence classes by exclusion

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