Arbitrary but predictive cues support attention to overlooked features

Abstract

• Predictive cues increase attention to overlooked features in word learning. • Preschoolers trained with predictive cues successfully learned new words. • Results help explain the attentional mechanism behind novel word learning. As children learn words, they develop attentional biases that support word learning but are hard to overcome. Predictive contextual cues may help increase attention to non-biased, or overlooked, features. This study sought to direct 3-year-old children’s attention to texture, a feature typically overlooked when categorizing new words early in development. During training, half of the children learned novel shape (a biased feature) and texture (an overlooked feature) categories with predictive cues, and half of the children learned the same categories with non-predictive cues. Children were then tested in a categorization task with novel texture words. The cues were present at test in Experiment 1 ( N = 63) and absent in Experiment 2 ( N = 37). Children in the predictive cue condition consistently chose the texture match more often than children in the non-predictive cue condition. These results inform our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may contribute to word learning.