Taking their eye off the ball: How shyness affects children’s attention during word learning

Matt Hilton,Katherine E Twomey,Gert Westermann

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2019.01.023

Matt Hilton, Katherine E Twomey + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.01.023

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Abstract

The current study tests the hypothesis that shy children’s reduced word learning is partly due to an effect of shyness on attention during object labeling. A sample of 20- and 26-month-old children (N = 32) took part in a looking-while-listening task in which they saw sets of familiar and novel objects while hearing familiar or novel labels. Overall, children increased attention to familiar objects when hearing their labels, and they divided their attention equally between the target and competitors when hearing novel labels. Critically, shyness reduced attention to the target object regardless of whether the heard label was novel or familiar. When children’s retention of the novel word–object mappings was tested after a delay, it was found that children who showed increased attention to novel objects during labeling showed better retention. Taken together, these findings suggest that shyer children perform less well than their less shy peers on measures of word learning because their attention to the target object is dampened. Thus, this work presents evidence that shyness modulates the low-level processes of visual attention that unfold during word learning.

Highlights

Taking their eye off the ball: How shyness affects children’s attention during word learning Reports on the development of language usually begin by celebrating children’s remarkable ability to learn words
Shyness is negatively correlated with vocabulary size when measured via parent-report checklists of children's vocabulary (Paul & Kellogg, 1997; Slomkowski, Nelson, Dunn, & Plomin, 1992), and these differences in productive vocabulary have been confirmed experimentally, with shyer children found to speak less than their less-shy peers in both familiar and unfamiliar settings (Asendorpf & Meier, 1993; Crozier & Badawood, 2009; Evans, 1987)
The current work set out to examine whether shyness affects the processes modulating attention during labeling and children’s subsequent word learning

Summary

Introduction

Taking their eye off the ball: How shyness affects children’s attention during word learning Reports on the development of language usually begin by celebrating children’s remarkable ability to learn words. Taking SES as an example, many argue that children raised in better-off families acquire language more quickly because their language input is easier to learn from (Hirsh-Pasek et al, 2015), it contains more words overall (Hart & Risley, 2003), contains a greater variety of word types (Hoff, 2003), and is more likely to be in a child-directed register (Rowe, 2008) These accounts argue that the effect of SES on language development can be attributed to the effect of SES on the child’s language input. Shyness is negatively correlated with vocabulary size when measured via parent-report checklists of children's vocabulary (Paul & Kellogg, 1997; Slomkowski, Nelson, Dunn, & Plomin, 1992), and these differences in productive vocabulary have been confirmed experimentally, with shyer children found to speak less than their less-shy peers in both familiar and unfamiliar settings (Asendorpf & Meier, 1993; Crozier & Badawood, 2009; Evans, 1987)

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