Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Suanda, Sumarga H.
• Mugwanya, Nassali
• Namy, Laura L.

Titel

Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children

Ist Teil von

• Journal of experimental child psychology, 2014-10, Vol.126, p.395-411

Ort / Verlag

Amsterdam: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Six-year-old children show rapid word learning across ambiguous situations.•Children’s cross-situational learning show context diversity effects.•Children’s cross-situational choice patterns reflect the statistical structure of the learning environment.•Children show learning patterns similar to those previously found with adult learners. Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of cross-situational statistical word learning in children’s early vocabulary development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children’s cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address the mechanisms underlying children’s learning by demonstrating that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational word learning at different points in development are discussed along with the methodological implications of employing school-aged children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting early word learning.