Context and repetition in word learning.

Jessica S. Horst

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00149

Abstract

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words. The current paper reviews this study and further examines the effect of contextual repetition on children's word learning in both shared storybook reading and other situations, including fast mapping by mutual exclusivity. The studies reviewed here suggest that the same cognitive mechanisms support word learning in a variety of situations. Both practical considerations for experimental design and directions for future research are discussed.

Highlights

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading
One common way in which young children encounter new words is via shared storybook reading (Sénéchal, 1997)
Future research should investigate how learning occurs via one-off shared storybook reading episodes and whether qualitative differences exist in what children learn depending on whether they learn via contextual repetition or variation

Summary

Context and repetition in word learning

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words. They need to attend to the lawnmower and wheel barrow to rule them out as the referent of “rake” but they need to attend to the rake to encode something about it to facilitate learning the “rake”-rake word-object association (see Horst and Samuelson, 2008; Mather, 2013) This is quite similar to learning words via shared storybook reading where children need to attend to and encode the wordobject association in the context of an illustration in a storybook and the prose. Processing three different storybook plots may have overloaded children’s attentional resources, making it especially challenging to notice and encode the novel

Word class Novelty

Dialogic techniques

Findings

CONCLUSIONS