The young and the meaningless: Novel-word learning without meaning or sleep

Abstract

Existing work suggests that sleep-based consolidation (Gaskell & Dumay, 2003) is required for newly learned words to interact with other words and phonology. Some studies report that meaning may also be needed (Leach and Samuel, 2007), making it unclear whether meaningful representations are required for such interactions. We addressed these issues by examining lexical competition between novel and known words during online word recognition. After a brief training on novel word-forms (without referents), we evaluated whether the newly learned items could compete with known words. During testing, participants heard word stimuli that were made by cross-splicing novel with known word-forms (NEP+NET=NEpT) and the activation of the target-word was quantified using the visual world paradigm. Results showed that the freshly learned word-forms engaged in competition with known words with only 15 minutes of training. These results are important for two reasons: First, lexical integration is initiated very early in learning and does not require associations with semantic representations or sleep-based consolidation. Second, given studies showing that lexical competition plays a critical role in resolving acoustic ambiguity (McMurray, Tanenhaus & Aslin, 2008; McMurray et al, 2009), our results imply that this competition does not have to be between semantically integrated lexical units.