Abstract
There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and reevaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig & Woodward, 2010): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learned words from a speaker who has previously revealed themself as reliable (correctly labeling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeler (incorrectly labeling familiar objects). Experiment 2 then provided the critical test for source monitoring: children first learned novel words from a speaker before watching that speaker labeling familiar objects correctly or incorrectly. Children who were exposed to the reliable speaker were significantly more likely to endorse the word mappings taught by the speaker than children who were exposed to a speaker who they later discovered was an unreliable labeler. Thus, young children can reevaluate recently learned word mappings upon discovering that the source of their knowledge is unreliable. This suggests that children can monitor the source of their knowledge in order to decide whether that knowledge is justified, even at an age where they are not credited with the ability to verbally report how they have come to know what they know.
Highlights
Children learn words through iterative social interactions
The cluster-based analysis revealed no difference in target-looking fixations between speaker conditions on the familiar word trials: Both groups of children fixated the target above chance
In the novel word trials, children in the reliable group looked significantly more toward the target object than children in the unreliable group with only children in the reliable group looking toward the target above-baseline preference
Summary
Children learn words through iterative social interactions. Research on cross-situational learning suggests that children have a fine-grained sensitivity to patterns of association that exist between words and the world, which they can use to gradually update their knowledge of a word’s meaning Much less is known regarding how this updating process is affected by social factors, such as the reliability of their source. We ask whether toddlers between 2 and 3 years of age can update their knowledge of how they came to know a word’s meaning, and use that information when constructing and updating their lexicon
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